are well known. The reason is that those theologians spoke about matters regarding which the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions had remained silent.

It is authentically reported from Mālik that during the lifetime of the Prophet ﷺ, Abū Bakr, and ʿUmar, no partisan passions existed—meaning the innovations of the Khārijites, the Rāfiḍites, and the Qadarites.

Those who came after the three virtuous generations indulged in most of the very issues that the leading Successors and their followers had repudiated. Not content with that, they blended questions of religion with Greek speculation, took the words of the philosophers as the primary standard, and forced any report that conflicted with those words into compliance through strained interpretation.

Still unsatisfied, they went on to claim that the discipline they had cultivated was the noblest of all sciences and the most deserving of pursuit, and that anyone who did not adopt their technical terminology was a mere layman, an ignoramus. Thus, felicitous is the one who clings to what the early generations were upon and avoids what the later generations introduced; and if he cannot altogether dispense with it, let him take from it only what necessity requires, while making the first path his principal concern.⦗1⦘

• Part of Allah’s far-reaching wisdom is that He appoints adversaries to the truth, so that through their opposition the soundness of the truth and its victory over falsehood become manifest—for pure gold appears only when exposed to the fire. And so, by His perfect power, all-embracing grace, and overwhelming might, Allah raises up men who demolish the arguments of these opponents and expose the worthlessness of their doubtful claims, showing them to be, as it has been said:

  Arguments that shatter like glass—you deem them solid and true,
  Yet every breaker of them ends up broken too.

Imām Aḥmad—may Allah have mercy on him—said in the preface to his book Refutation of the Jahmites: “Praise be to Allah, who in every period after the messengers has left behind remnants of the people of knowledge who call…”