of holding the doctrine of qadar (divine decree)—is his ḥadīth to be written down?”
He replied, “Yes. Qatādah, Hishām al-Dastawāʾī, Saʿīd ibn Abī ʿArūbah, ʿAbd al-Wārith—and he named others besides—were all described as Qadari, yet they are reliable; their narrations are recorded so long as they do not invite people to their view.

I say: This is a significant question. When a Qadari, Muʿtazili, Jahmi, or Rāfiḍi is known to be truthful in transmission, upright in piety, and not an active propagandist for his innovation, the majority of scholars accept his reports and act upon them. They then differed about the one who does call others to his innovation: may ḥadīth be taken from him?

Many of the ḥuffāẓ chose to avoid his narrations altogether and to boycott them. Others said: if we have verified his truthfulness, even though he is a propagandist, and we find with him a sunnah that no one else has preserved, how can it be permissible for us to abandon that sunnah?

A survey of the practice of the leading ḥadīth scholars shows that, so long as a man’s innovation does not expel him from the fold of Islam or make his blood licit, it is permissible to accept what he relates.

This issue, however, has not become as clear to me as it should. What is evident to me is that anyone who falls into an innovation, yet is not regarded as one of its chiefs nor deeply immersed in it, may have his ḥadīth accepted—just as Ḥāfiẓ Abū Zakariyyāʾ illustrated with the men just mentioned—and their reports fill the authoritative Islamic collections because of their honesty and precision (1).