“This is sheer conjecture and fabrication. I have dealt with the issue in detail over four pages of the Introduction ⦗17–20⦘, where I explicitly stated—in the preface to the third edition—the purpose of this terminology, and showed that al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Baghawī had already employed it in Sharḥ al-Sunna. By doing so I proved that your claim rests on pure guesswork and ignorance. How did you answer that? Instead of acknowledging your ignorance and the baseless accusation you leveled against your Muslim brother—while fully aware of the facts—you stubbornly clung to it and refused to retract. Rather, you resorted to haughtiness and self-pity, posing in your reply as an innocent victim before readers who, for the most part, have no idea what your own hands have wrought.
Is this the conduct befitting someone who opens his treatise with the words: ‘Furthermore, Allah the Exalted has legislated for us this upright religion so that it may bar the believer from every evil and harm, summon him to every good and virtue, and enable whoever affiliates himself with it to embody upright character and sound behavior, so that he speaks nothing but the truth…’ and so on? The close of his statement calls to mind the proverb, ‘She blamed me for her own ailment and slipped away,’ for he accuses us of lies and fabrications while he himself is their very source and fountainhead. This is the first example right before you.
So is this obstinate persistence in accusation and feigned ignorance part of the “upright character” Abu Ghuddah champions, when he knows the Almighty’s words: ‘O you who believe, why do you say what you do not do? It is most detested in the sight of Allah that you say what you do not do.’ (Qur’an 61:2–3)
- He also faulted me for my remark on the report of Ibn Masʿūd—‘Perish the one who has no heart by which he recognizes good and evil’—after which I wrote, ‘I do not know it.’ He then commented, verbatim: ‘Does he mean by this that he does not know good from evil (!), or that he does not know the words of ʿAbdullāh ibn Masʿūd?’