in excellence—Allah is pleased with them and they are pleased with Him, and He has prepared for them gardens beneath which rivers flow, wherein they shall remain forever. That is the supreme triumph. [At-Tawbah 9:100]
Then there came after them generations who were blind to the truth, or who deliberately shut their eyes to it; so they went astray and led others astray—whether out of deficient understanding, willful negligence, transgression, or sheer injustice. They introduced into Allah’s religion things that do not belong to it—in creed, in worship, and in conduct. To justify that, they twisted the texts of the Quran and the Sunnah, or denied them altogether whenever they could.
Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah said: “Know that most of the innovations connected to knowledge and acts of devotion only appeared in the ummah toward the end of the rule of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, exactly as the Prophet ﷺ foretold when he said: ‘Whoever among you lives long after me will witness much discord, so hold fast to my Sunnah and the Sunnah of the Rightly Guided Caliphs after me…’
“He went on to say: When the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs ended and dominion passed into kingship, deficiency manifested itself in the rulers; inevitably, it had to surface among the people of knowledge and religion as well.
“Thus, in the closing days of ʿAlī’s caliphate (may Allah be pleased with him) the two innovations of the Khawārij and the Rāfiḍites arose, both of which revolve around the question of imāmah and khilāfah and the legal rulings that follow from that.
“Muʿāwiyah’s rule was a reign of dominion coupled with mercy; but once it ended and the emirate of Yazīd began, the turmoil of al-Ḥusayn’s killing in Iraq erupted, along with the rebellion of the people of al-Ḥarrah in Madinah, and the siege of Mecca when ʿAbdullāh ibn al-Zubayr rose up. Yazīd then died and the ummah fragmented: Ibn al-Zubayr held al-Ḥijāz; the Banū al-Ḥakam held Syria; and al-Mukhtār ibn Abī ʿUbayd and others seized Iraq. All this occurred toward the end of the Companions’ era, while such men as ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbbās, ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar, Jābir ibn ʿAbdullāh, Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī, and others were still alive. It was then that the innovations of the Qadariyyah and the Murjiʾah appeared, and the remaining Companions refuted them … along with the other innovations that they and those who followed them continued to repel.