Al-Subkī went even further and said: “Al-Dhahabī does this on purpose; whenever he pens the biography of a Ḥanafī, Mālikī, or Shāfiʿī scholar he becomes furiously angry, then snips the wording and shreds it. On top of that, he is not properly versed in the shades of meaning carried by words, so he may employ a term of disparagement which—had he understood its sense—he would never have uttered.” (1)

These strictures of al-Subkī sparked a debate among historians. Al-Sakhāwī (d. 902 AH) replied, accusing al-Subkī of excessive partisanship toward the Ashʿarīs, and he transmitted the statement of ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Kanānī (d. 819 AH) about al-Subkī: “He is a man of little courtesy, devoid of fairness, ignorant of the people of the Sunnah and their ranks.” (2)

Yūsuf ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (d. 909 AH) said in his Muʿjam al-Shāfiʿiyyah: “These words of his against al-Dhahabī are unacceptable, for al-Dhahabī was far above uttering what has no basis… The reproof directed at him is more warranted than that directed at al-Dhahabī, especially since al-Dhahabī was his own shaykh and teacher; he ought not to have gone to such extremes against him.” (3)

In truth, al-Subkī was an uncompromising, fiercely zealous Ashʿarī. Nothing illustrates this better than the coarse insults he hurls at al-Dhahabī in the entry on Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī in the Ṭabaqāt, where he sinks into flagrant abuse simply because al-Dhahabī did not provide a lengthy biography of al-Ashʿarī in his Tārīkh al-Islām and confined himself to directing the reader to Ibn ʿAsākir’s work Tabʿyīn Kadhib al-Muftarī—something al-Subkī deemed a grave shortcoming toward al-Ashʿarī. (4) He had read—