and the like. That is so. (1)

Eighth:

He said: “And (2) the proof of this is that the leading scholars of the Sunnah and the virtuous of the ummah after the Companions of the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—did not place in their books the reports whose meanings are ambiguous. Thus Mālik—may Allah be pleased with him—did not include any such material in the Muwaṭṭaʾ, unlike al-Ājurri and those like him; likewise al-Shāfiʿī, Abū Ḥanīfah, Sufyān, al-Layth, and al-Thawrī, none of whom concerned themselves with transmitting the problematic narrations.”

These words could only be uttered by someone who is utterly ignorant of those imams, of what they transmitted, and of what they authored. His statement is no more than a shot in the dark from one far removed from the facts, for the transmission of these very hadiths by those imams and their peers is something known to anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with those [imams] (3). It is from these very men and their like that the narrations were taken; they are the ones who conveyed them to the ummah. The falsehood of this claim is more obvious than to require any clarification. The speaker did not, however, intend to lie; rather, his knowledge of their actual state was scant. He imagined that no one would transmit such hadiths except an ignoramus—those he labels the mushabbihah (anthropomorphists) (5) or the zanādiqa (heretics)—and in his view such people are innocent of them. Thus, the combination of his meagre grasp of the truth and the assumption arising from his corrupt creed produced this statement, which contains a level of calumny, ignorance, and misguidance that is obvious even to the simplest of men.

Ninth:

He said that Mālik did not include any of them in the Muwaṭṭaʾ, yet he actually cited the hadiths of the Descent and the hadiths of Laughter among those he repudiated, and it is well known that the hadith of