gladly, but he soon returned regretful, for Abu Ghuddah had refused to meet, despite the professors’ approval of my proposal, as Dr. al-Miṣrī—one of the people I trust most—told me.

Start of the Refutation of Abu Ghuddah’s Words and Fabrications

Roughly three years after the rebuttal to his unjust memorandum had been printed, Shaykh Abu Ghuddah produced a new booklet entitled Kalimāt fī Kashf Abāṭīl wa-Iftirāʾāt (Words Unveiling Falsehoods and Fabrications), in which he states at the end that he completed it on 12/4/1394 AH in Riyadh. Once I had finished reading it, I realized that it was directed against a number of scholars who had already refuted him and had shown the public his ignorance of the Sunnah and his fierce hostility toward its adherents and their leading authorities—foremost among them Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah, his pupil the erudite Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, and the champion of monotheism Shaykh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, may Allah have mercy on them all. Abu Ghuddah harbors the most intense enmity toward these scholars, blindly following his misguided shaykh al-Kawtharī, whose legacy he merely perpetuates! The booklet contains not a shred of genuine knowledge; it is nothing but outright lies and fabrications.

Among its falsehoods is his attempt to persuade readers that a clique of authors is conspiring against him in concert—“people with evil aims and deviant, treacherous intentions…,” as he puts it. This is pure slander, and to expose it I say:

The books or pamphlets Abu Ghuddah critiques—giving the impression that this imagined group collaborated in writing and disseminating them—are:

1 – al-Taṣawwuf bayna al-Ḥaqq wa-al-Khalq (Sufism Between Truth and Creation) by Ustadh Muḥammad Fahr al-Shaqfa, second edition, expanded and verified. It is well known that the person who oversaw its publication and added the annotations was Ustadh Maḥmūd Istānbulī.