his unjust memorandum,” he did nothing more than count the words with which we had—rightly—described him, saying (p. 10):

“He has stuffed it with the following expressions: ‘bigotry, deliberate lying, … ignorance … blind imitation … hypocrisy … that I am a Ḥanafī … reviling the Ḥanafī shaykhs, claiming that they are extremely fanatical and that they harbor intense enmity toward the people of hadith….’”

I say: The strange thing is that he merely repeated the expressions I used about him without answering them with evidence and proof, contenting himself with calling them “a clear slander.” Yet these words occur in the midst of my reply to him, which runs to 44 pages. The terms he listed do not even fill a single page—so where is his response to the rest of the pages in which I convicted him of all this? Can any fair-minded person doubt, when he sees that Abu Ghuddah did not write a single word in rebuttal to establish his innocence, that had he found any way to do so he would not have settled for the meager protest just cited?

There is no harm, then, in repeating a summary of what Abu Ghuddah charged me with and hinted at in his unjust memorandum, together with my reply to him and the points on which I condemned him in the introduction.

A Summary of Abu Ghuddah’s Objections to Me, My Reply, and the Grounds on Which I Condemned Him in the “Introduction”

1. He charged me with saying in the documentation of hadiths, “Sound—reported by Muslim” or “Sound—agreed upon,” alleging that the authenticity stems from my own ruling, not from that of Imam Muslim or the two Shaykhs. Conversely, when I wrote “Reported by Muslim” or “Agreed upon” without prefacing it with “Sound,” he took this to mean that I was withholding judgment pending further review. He declared: “He has introduced something unprecedented by earlier or later scholars.” I said to him: