is an obligation upon every believer, just as Waraqah ibn Nawfal said: “If I live to see your day, I will surely support you with a decisive support.” (1) Thereafter I ask Allah to preserve me, in what I now say, from overstepping the limits or yielding to caprice. (2)

I say: A person of this sort—without specifying the individual by name—must fall under one of several possibilities.

First: he may be advanced in years, his judgment altered by old age—not in the sense of derangement, but in that an elderly man may strive for the truth yet apply it in the wrong place. For example, he exerts himself in the conviction that forbidding wrong is obligatory, decides that this matter is indeed wrong and that its proponent has gained popularity among the people, and therefore deems it his duty to make known to them what has spread among them, all the while unaware (3) of the harms involved.

Among those harms is the demoralization of the students, who are in need (4) of loving their shaykh so that they may learn from him. If their hearts turn away from him and they perceive some deficiency in him, they are deprived of both his outward and inward benefits, and it is feared that they will incur Allah’s anger first and the shaykh’s displeasure second. (5)

The second harm: when the innovators—against whom we and our shaykh stand night and day, striving and directing all our efforts to champion the truth—learn that among our own followers there is someone who