what you do not do? It is most hateful in the sight of Allah that you say what you do not do.’

These are but a handful of examples drawn from Shaykh al-Ghazālī’s many attitudes toward the Prophetic Sunnah—whether the reports are authentic or weak. He takes from them whatever he fancies and rejects whatever conflicts with his inclination, without anchoring himself to any principle acknowledged by the scholars. As has been shown, it is nothing but blind arbitrariness.

I have cited these anecdotes so that readers may discern his method in discarding ḥadīths deemed sound by the specialists. He is not one of those scholars in learning, such that he could distinguish the authentic from the weak by their standards—my verification of his Fiqh al-Sīrah, together with the preceding examples, is decisive proof of that. Nor does he stand with them, in the sense of Allah’s words, ‘And be with the truthful,’ and His saying, ‘Ask the people of knowledge if you do not know.’ His preface to my aforementioned verification, along with the earlier illustrations, only reinforces this point. One who is neither of those scholars nor with them should, at the very least, adopt the attitude voiced by the pre-Islamic poet:

Am I anything but a man of Ghaziyyah? If Ghaziyyah goes astray, I go astray; and if Ghaziyyah is guided, I am guided.

To conclude, take his stance on al-Bukhārī’s ḥadīth concerning musical instruments and the way he declares it weak. That single instance suffices to show that his criticism of ḥadīths is driven by whim and blind conjecture. He remarked—pp. 66–67—to a Gulf scholar while discussing the night of mid-Shaʿbān: ‘I think the ḥadīths transmitted about the mid-Shaʿbān night are stronger than the ḥadīths reported on the prohibition of music.’