or to an Islamic preacher who has no grasp of hadith or fiqh, is unaware of their principles and of the reference works that must be consulted—or perhaps he does know them but, for one reason or another, cannot handle them. As the poet said:

If you yourself cannot see the moon when it rises,
Then defer to those whose eyes have sighted it.

You are not one of those people—nor do I think your seniority, or your obstinacy, will allow you to deny that—and yet you have not deferred to them. Rather, you have appointed yourself to rebut them, ridiculing their statements and scoffing at them, as though you had not learned—or having learned, did not believe—the Prophet’s ﷺ words: “Arrogance is rejecting the truth and belittling people” (Ṣaḥīḥah 134, 1626); and his saying: “Three things are destructive: greed that is obeyed, a passion that is followed, and a person’s admiration of himself” (Ṣaḥīḥah 1802); and his saying: “Were you to be free of sins, I would fear for you something worse than that: self-admiration” (Ṣaḥīḥah 658). So fear what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ feared for you, lest you be among the doomed.

This is a sincere counsel I offer you—for religion is sincere counsel. You, like me, are standing on the brink of your grave. I address the same advice to everyone who follows your path of defying the specialists in hadith and fiqh—how many such people there are today—among them that Saggāf and his shadow, the one called Ḥassān ʿAbd al-Manān, who has gone to extremes in declaring sound hadith weak, contradicting the great preservers and critics, all the while pretending to be a lone mujtahid rather than an imitator, deceiving his readers with claims at odds with reality. Allah enabled me to refute him regarding some of the reports he weakened, and I showed that he is a mere climber upon this discipline, seeking prominence and notoriety; about him the words of the ḥāfiẓ are most apt