that he did not immediately hasten to brand the report a lie and disown its attribution to him, as is his wont in comparable situations. The reader will find in his Kalimāt numerous instances of this very habit.

Second, his own statement, “And whoever, in these days, ascribes this allegation to the people of this sacred land….” The phrase “in these days”—and, as the Ḥanafīs maintain, the implicit meanings of a scholar’s wording carry legal weight—indicates that anyone who made the claim before these days is not among those upon whom Abū Ghuddah pronounced total madness. It is as though he wishes to say: “I truly did utter it before I had firsthand knowledge, before I associated with the Najdīs in their homeland; once I did so, the falsity of the revulsion attributed to them became clear to me.” If that is what he intends, why did he not display a little scholarly courage and state plainly that he had been misled by the tendentious propaganda broadcast east and west by many of his innovating teachers—such as al-Kawtharī and his likes, and before him Zaynī Daḥlān and his ilk—propaganda that filled the Muslim lands, Syria in particular, with this baseless charge? Is it not obligatory for him, and for all who later discovered the truth, to announce it publicly and fear no blame for the sake of Allah?

The second overall point is that he explicitly affirms that attributing such revulsion to the people of this “sacred land” is, in his words, pure falsehood and madness. We therefore ask him: Who exactly are the inhabitants of the sacred land he has in mind? If he means the people of Najd, whose capital is Riyadh, on what legal basis does he deem that region sacred—especially when men of his stripe have long disparaged it and its people? Their own practice shows this: the majority of them still interpret the Prophet’s supplication—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—when he said, “O Allah, bless our Syria; O Allah, bless our Yemen,” and they responded, “And our Najd as well, O Messenger of Allah?”