then who among the Imams of the Sunnah ever said that gratitude can exist only as an inner conviction?
Ibn al-Murahhal replied, “Such a statement has indeed been transmitted; reporting it is not forbidden, yet it remains problematic, and one must say: this is a questionable view.”
Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah said, “Transmission is of two kinds:
- to relay what one has personally heard or seen;
- to relay something by way of independent reasoning and deduction.
Thus, when someone says, ‘The doctrine of so-and-so is such-and-such,’ or, ‘The creed of Ahl al-Sunnah is such-and-such,’ he may be attributing it to them because he believes (1) that their foundational principles entail it, even though the person himself never stated it. Such attributions are often erroneous (2).
Do you not see that many authors (3) say (4), ‘The position of al-Shāfiʿī—or someone else—is such-and-such,’ while his own explicit statement is to the contrary? Their excuse is that they perceived his principles to necessitate that view, so they ascribed it to his school on the basis of inference rather than an explicit text.
Likewise, since Ahl al-Sunnah do not declare a person an unbeliever on account of sins, whereas the Khārijites