He said, “Restricting the footnote to what the editor deemed sufficient would have sufficed; yet people with ulterior motives exploited that note in the worst possible manner. The editor’s purpose was to rebut the zealots who, through their words and their blind partisanship for their imam and their school, echoed the error of those misguided individuals who claim that our Master the Messenger of Allah, Jesus son of Mary (peace be upon him), will return endorsing the very disbelief in Allah, in Jesus, and in his pure mother to which they themselves cling.

In fact, the editor’s remark was an answer to the letters, fatwas, and statements asserting that when our Master Jesus (peace be upon him) descends at the end of time he will judge according to the Ḥanafi school. They cite as proof a ludicrous dream narrated by an unknown person, who claims that the school’s teachings have been preserved in a chest lying in the River Jīḥūn, containing what al-Khidr learned from Abū Ḥanīfah. Before Jesus’ descent, they say, the Qur’an and all knowledge will be withdrawn; Jesus will then go to the river, perplexed, seeking knowledge there, whereupon a hand will appear holding the chest of knowledge al-Khidr deposited, filled with what he had learned from Imām Abū Ḥanīfah—may Allah have mercy on him.

This is what the editor refuted in a single, concise line—whose import scholars readily grasp—thinking thereby to help them cite the Prophet’s ḥadīth: “How will you fare when…,” after which he mentioned the ḥadīth and the earlier annotation. The brother who issued the second edition then said:

‘Among those who report the tale of the river, al-Khidr, and Abū Ḥanīfah is Imām al-Ḥaṣkafī, one of the leading figures of the school of Imām Abū Ḥanīfah—may Allah be pleased with him—in the introduction to his celebrated work al-Durr al-Mukhtār, upon which Ibn ʿĀbidīn wrote his marginal commentary, the greatest book of the Hanafis in later centuries and indeed one of the foremost references in Islamic jurisprudence as a whole.

The editor avoided rehearsing the story in detail, because tracing…’