Yet he thrusts himself into the company of jurists who, he imagines, can fault the traditionists for some anomaly or subtle defect that has escaped them. In reality, the man possesses no learning in hadith, nor in the jurisprudence drawn from it; all he offers is blind randomness, in open conflict with the method of Muslim scholars—both hadith experts and jurists—in fundamentals and in details.

Whenever an authentic hadith clashes with his opinion, he abolishes it under one of his many baseless pretexts. He will say, for instance, “So-and-so declared it weak,” though he knows very well that others—more knowledgeable than that critic or greater in number—have graded it sound, exactly as he does with the forthcoming Bukhari hadith about musical instruments. At another time he will dismiss it on the ground that it is an isolated report, even though he also knows that solitary reports are, by unanimous agreement, authoritative in legal and practical matters. If for one reason or another he cannot repudiate it outright, he evades acting upon it with the claim, “Its indication is not definitive,” while he also knows that the scholars do not require definitiveness here; for them, a preponderant probability is enough. Were we to turn this argument back on him, we would overturn every one of his objections, for not a single one of them rests with certainty upon evidence that is both definitively established and definitively indicative—otherwise no dispute would have arisen at all.

Should the hadith concern practical rulings or matters of the unseen, he rejects it with the line, “It touches neither creed nor practice,” or he fabricates for it a meaning born of his own fancy—false in itself—and then attaches that meaning to the hadith, from which it is altogether free. As for the scholars’ explanations, in which they defend the hadith with proper knowledge, he looks down on them and discards their words, vilifying them with insults that befit him far more than them—just as when he declares on p. 29:

“We say: all this defense is lightweight; it is a trifling defense that cannot be accepted.”

With such a claim he opposes the very scholars in question—the hadith commentators al-Mazari, Qadi ‘Iyad, and al-Nawawi, from whose work he actually quoted the passage under discussion—yet he deceived his readers, for he began the quotation