of the very accusation he had fastened upon them while he was still in Aleppo, before he himself settled in that “sacred land”?!

The answer is that, had he ventured such an explicit declaration, two unavoidable consequences would have stared him in the face—at least one of which he could not escape:

1. He would have had to indict himself for lying and slandering the innocent. Allah says, “Whoever commits a sin or wrongdoing and then casts it upon the innocent has burdened himself with calumny and a manifest sin” [Qur’an 4:112]. How much worse, then, when the slander is hurled at an entire group—indeed, at a whole nation—and once he took up residence among them he began to exonerate them and ingratiate himself with lavish praise in his “Words” (pp. 13–14)!

2. He would risk dismissal from the post he is so eager to keep, a post for whose sake he now presents himself to the public as a Salafi who upholds the monotheism taught by Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb.

Thirdly: Suppose, purely for argument’s sake, that Abū Ghuddah did intend by his earlier remark to clear the Najdis themselves of the charge he had once leveled against them, and that by “the sacred land” he really meant the Two Holy Sanctuaries, attributing them to the Najdis only because they rule over them. In that case the move is nothing but a sly and malevolent dodge. The accusation ascribed to him was not directed at the rulers of those holy precincts; it targeted the monotheist group living in Aleppo and other Syrian cities who are known there as “Salafis.” They are the ones Abū Ghuddah is said to have slandered. If we now see him fleeing from absolving them and instead proclaiming the innocence of people no one ever claimed he had accused—though he and other innovators do, in fact, lump them together with the Salafis and other champions of monotheism—this can only mean two things: