nor was that all; he even named his eldest son “Zāhid,” seeking blessing through that name and keeping his memory alive. We pointed out to him that such a gesture merely yokes light to darkness and truth to falsehood.
18 – We also uncovered the intense hostility that Abū Ghuddah and others inherited from al-Kawtharī—hostility that the man broadcast, indeed trumpeted, throughout his books and marginalia against the people of hadith in general and, in particular, against Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim. He charges them with anthropomorphism and corporealism (tashbīh and tajsīm), brands them the “foolish ḥashwiyyah,” calls Imām Ibn Khuzaymah’s Kitāb al-Tawḥīd “The Book of Polytheism,” and declares the Imām himself an anthropomorphist ignorant of the fundamentals of the religion, rigid in fiqh, and slow-witted—in short, no more than a porter of books. He maligned roughly three hundred reliable transmitters, among them leading ḥuffāẓ, imams, and jurists such as Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Aḥmad. He accuses Aḥmad’s son ʿAbd Allāh, the transmitter of the Musnad, of fabrication and therefore deems him unfit to be relied upon. He labels the ḥāfiẓ al-ʿUqaylī “the prejudiced loser,” and says of Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah: “If Ibn Taymiyyah is still Shaykh al-Islām, then peace be upon Islam!”
Abū Ghuddah knows all of this full well, yet he still showers him with inflated honorifics—“the erudite scholar, the meticulous verifier, the conclusive proof, the ḥadith expert, the jurist, the legal theorist, the theologian, the dialectician, the historian, the critic, the imām”!!! From that, together with information we possess about him and his failure, despite countless opportunities, to denounce a single one of his teacher al-Kawtharī’s pronouncements in any of his annotations, I concluded that he is a Kawtharī to the core—one hundred percent—in his enmity toward the people of ḥadith and the Sunnah and toward Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah. Still, the thought crossed my mind that he might have repented of his discipleship to the man and of adopting his deviations, so I left the door open for him to recant and we asked