—may Allah be pleased with him—and from his explicit statements; yet certain innovators sometimes attributed to him (1) things of which he was completely innocent, (2) alleging, for example, that he said, “There is no Qur’an in the muṣḥaf, and there is no Prophet in the grave,” that he approved al-istithnāʾ with respect to faith, that he denied the pre-eternal power to create (3), that he declared the common people unbelievers, and that he made possession of demonstrative knowledge obligatory for them.
He said (4): “I have examined whatever of his writings I have been able to consult and found every one of them to be at variance with what is imputed to him; and it is no wonder that they attacked him and fabricated lies, for—may Allah have mercy on him—he exposed the Qadariyya and most of the other innovators, laying bare their shame. There is no good in anyone who does not know his own detractor.” (7)
Shaykh Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāʾīnī said in his work on uṣūl al-fiqh (8)—a commentary on al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla that he entitled “A Question on Whether the Command Is a Command by Its Very Formulation or by an Accompanying Indicator”: “People have differed over the command: does it possess a specific wording that, by itself, indicates a command….”
(1) In S and T: “from him.”
(2) The text enclosed in brackets is omitted by Tabyin Kizb al-Muftari (Clarification of the Slanderer’s Falsehood).
(3) In Tabyin Kizb al-Muftari: “and the denial of the power of created beings.”
(4) The text within brackets is an addition from S and T, and the passage continues from the preceding section in Tabyin Kizb al-Muftari.
(5) In Tabyin Kizb al-Muftari: “Whoever authored it—if you examine his sincere intent in these matters, you will find it.”
(6) In Tabyin Kizb al-Muftari: “and they abridged it.”
(7) The sheikh—may Allah have mercy on him—commented on this, saying: “...but what is meant here is that he counted among the categories in which al-Shāfiʿī disagreed—and from which his students turned away—the issue of the formulations of expressions, which is the question of divine speech (kalam). His position on this follows Ibn Kilāb’s view: that the speech of Allah is a single, eternal attribute of the Self of Allah the Exalted; if expressed in Arabic it is the Qurʾān, if in Hebrew it is the Tawrah (Torah), if in Syriac it is the Injīl (Gospel). And the Arabic Qurʾān is neither the speech by which Allah speaks nor His speech; rather He created it in certain bodies.” Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa-l-naql (Repelling the Contradiction between Reason and Revelation), vol. 2, p. 110.
(8) In S: the book Uṣūl. The introduction to Abū Ḥāmid was given above, and the following report from him appears in Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa-l-naql, vol. 2, pp. 106–108.