him to make a complete and detailed declaration of innocence from him, and I said:
“If he does so—and I do not expect he will—we shall take his statement at face value and leave what lies in his heart to his Lord.”

19 – Realizing that he might verbally repudiate his teacher al-Kawtharī, I followed that with seven questions drawn from Sharḥ al-ʿAqīda al-Ṭaḥāwiyya—a work whose commentator Abū Ghuddah praised and described as a manifest imām. Those questions encapsulate the creed of the early generations, against which al-Kawtharī takes issue; among them are their affirmation that the Qur’an is uncreated, that Allah is above all His creation, that one may ask “Where is Allah?”, that faith increases and decreases, and other matters set out there. I posed these questions to expose his true beliefs and to prevent him from misleading people with mere words, acting on the report from ʿUmar (may Allah be pleased with him): “I am not cunning, nor can the cunning deceive me.”

20 – I further condemned him for stealthily submitting his iniquitous memorandum without my knowledge or that of his friend at the time, the owner of al-Maktab al-Islāmī. This, despite the fact that he and I met repeatedly in that very office over the years following the book’s publication, and he never discussed with me a single issue he later raised in that unjust report. He lodged it only years later, when he thought the moment ripe to sate his spite and cool the rancor in his heart by attacking al-Albānī and harming the book’s publisher, Mr. Zuhayr al-Shāwish—behavior befitting only spies and informers.

This is some of what I charged Shaykh Abū Ghuddah with in the Introduction, which runs for 44 pages (pp. 13–57) and the material preceding them.