even if they were weak, their combined weight would still lend the subject considerable strength. To dismiss them all as null and fabricated is—beyond any doubt—plainly false.

In the same vein of disregarding the expertise of qualified scholars, his colleague, the well-known Egyptian writer Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, proceeds in his latest book, The Prophetic Sunnah between the Jurists and the Traditionists. In that work there becomes unmistakably clear what had only surfaced now and then in some of his previous books and scattered articles: a departure from the Quran, the Sunnah, and the juristic understanding of the imams—contrary to what he leads his readers to believe, as when he says in the introduction to that book (p. 11):

“I affirm, first and last, that I am with the great caravan of Islam—the caravan led by the Rightly Guided Caliphs, the followed imams, and the trustworthy scholars, generation after generation, the later calling the former onward.”

These are fine words, but finer still would be to live by them and make them a life-long method. Sadly, however, this is one of those statements about which it is said: “Read it and you rejoice; put it to the test and you grieve,” for the man’s true orientation has now been laid bare in the clearest possible terms: he is not with the great caravan… indeed, not even with the small one.

Rather, he sides with those few aberrant rationalists who have no school but to follow whatever their minds embellish for them. They cherry-pick from every madhhab whatever rare or eccentric view happens to please them. One of the early Muslims said, “Whoever carries the oddities of knowledge carries a great evil.”1 Yet he