They also granted him formal authorizations in their narrations and in the various branches of learning. He debated, taught, issued legal opinions, and authored works on jurisprudence, hadith, and creed, winning the admiration of everyone who met him, attended his lessons or debates, or read any of his writings. Those writings themselves attest to the breadth of his vision, his firm command of the Sharʿī sciences, and the range and depth of his reading and understanding. Nor did he, in those works, confine himself to the books of Ibn Taymiyyah—as this ignorant, or wilfully ignorant, critic imagines; rather, he quoted the opinions of the great imams of jurisprudence, exegesis, and hadith, which demonstrates his extensive learning, penetrating comprehension, and clear-sightedness. His printed and widely circulated books stand as living proof of this—praise be to Allah. The Shaykh adopted from Ibn Taymiyyah, or from anyone else, only what the evidence showed to be correct; indeed, he disagreed with Shaykh al-Islam on certain juristic questions.

3. Abu Zahrah then said of those he dubbed “the Wahhābīs” that, in truth, they added nothing to Ibn Taymiyyah’s doctrines in matters of creed, but were even stricter about them and systematized certain theoretical issues that Ibn Taymiyyah had not discussed because they were not well known in his day. He summarized his charge as follows:

(1) They were not content to define worship as Islam has set it out in the Quran and the Sunnah—and as Ibn Taymiyyah had explained—but further insisted that the very forms of worship must never step outside the bounds of Islam, obliging Muslims to adhere to what they themselves adhered to1. For that reason they declared tobacco unlawful and were extremely severe about it, to the point that the common folk among them regarded a smoker as though he were a polytheist; in this they resembled the Khārijites, who used to pronounce grave sinners unbelievers.