Third: His use of the expression “their assault” is a double falsehood. There is no assault whatsoever; it is nothing but sincere advice and a reminder. And were we to concede, for the sake of argument, that it were an assault, I alone would be accountable for it; neither the publisher nor anyone else bears any responsibility.

5 – His repeated charge that we attack the schools of law, and our rebuttal of him in this matter together with his pretence that those very schools constitute the Sharīʿah.

It is as though Abū Ghuddah senses, deep within, that the accusation he has tried to pin on me in order to provoke the authorities there against me will rebound on him in failure—if it does not prove an arrow in his own throat. Hence he has taken another route, one he had previously pursued by word of mouth and now revisits with his pen, thereby laying bare further aspects of his ignorance of Islam and a host of other calumnies.

Thus he is like a man seeking his own doom with his own hoof, digging his grave with his very hands. After alleging that I regarded his affiliation with the Ḥanafī school as grounds for belittling him—and that, too, is a lie—he went on, under the heading “Their Attack on the Four Schools,” to say:

“It does not surprise me in the least that they behave in this way, so long as they believe that affiliation to any of the Imams of the followed schools is a stigma and a disgrace with which the adherents of those schools are branded. For they have placed the followed schools on a par with the Gospel, expelled them from the domain of our Sacred Law and from the Qur’an and Sunnah, and claimed that they are something else—yes, they have claimed that they are other than the Qur’an and Sunnah. I do not know what they mean by that, nor what they are aiming at behind it!

Here is their statement, word for word, in the marginal notes to the Abridgement of Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim by al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Mundhirī, printed in Kuwait in both the first and second editions, volume two, p. 308: