with the words: “al-Mazari said …,” and ends it with, “… this view was preferred by al-Mazari and Qadi ‘Iyad.” This, in fact, is the full passage he quoted. He actually took it from al-Nawawi’s commentary on Sahih Muslim, and it is al-Nawawi who writes, “al-Mazari said …,” and so forth. He therefore should have attributed it to him, but he did not, for he knows the stature and fame of Imam al-Nawawi among Muslims and judged it unwise to draw attention to his own pettiness as well.

Such are a few of his wavering stances toward the authentic hadiths he rejects.

When, however, a hadith is weak or lacks any basis, he declares it sound, strong, and well-supported, relying on his self-styled “legislating intellect,” and then deploys it to overturn what is firmly established in the Sharia. In reply to those who have graded the report weak— or might do so—he says, “But its meaning accords with a verse from the Book of Allah or with a sound hadith from the Sunnah.”

Look at his statement in the introduction to his book Fiqh al-Sīrah, under the heading “On the Hadiths of the Book.” There you will find his open admission that he authenticates the hadith the specialists deem weak and weakens the one they deem sound. On what grounds? On the loftiest criteria known to the hadith scholars—criteria he himself listed at the beginning of his book al-Sunnah, pp. 14–15—merely to throw dust in people’s eyes. No; in his innermost self he does not believe in them—Allah knows best—and even if he did, he is incapable of applying them properly. He bases everything on nothing but his own opinion and his claim that the hadith’s meaning is correct, and the poor man has no inkling of the degree of misguidance into which he has fallen because of