and his colleagues and students, who all know that his real reverence is reserved for al-Kawtharī. In fact, he has pleased neither party.

You will see, once the dust has cleared—
Is the mount beneath you a charger or a donkey?

2 – He offers a prayer of mercy for Ibn Taymiyyah only twice (pp. 47, 78).

3 – In a few places he merely calls him “the shaykh.” As I explained in the Introduction, this designation is not, in itself, explicit praise or commendation; refer back to that discussion.

4 – In most of the pages he cited there is none of the language he claimed—no marks of reverence or esteem whatsoever. These pages are 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 113. On some of them he even mentions Ibn Taymiyyah more than once—for instance, on the last page he cites him three times—yet never goes beyond the bare words “Ibn Taymiyyah,” begrudging him even a single prayer for mercy!

All of this makes plain to the reader that when Abū Ghuddah heaps up page numbers to prove his veneration for Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah and one then finds that most of those pages contain nothing of the sort, he comes squarely under the Prophet’s saying, peace and blessings be upon him: “Whoever pretends to possess what he has not been given is like a man dressed in two garments of falsehood.” We ask Allah for wellbeing and safety.

What further confirms this is that he also quotes from Shaykh al-Islām’s archenemy—his own teacher al-Kawtharī—on almost the same number of pages as those in which he cites Ibn Taymiyyah. On most of those pages he labels al-Kawtharī “the imam,” elsewhere “our shaykh,” and at times he says