—“and were you to follow their whims after the knowledge that has come to you” (Surah al-Baqarah 2:120). Concerning the Quran He also said: “He revealed it with His knowledge” (Surah al-Nisāʾ 4:166), meaning that His knowledge is embedded in it.

As the link with this knowledge grew distant, many people ended up treating the fleeting notions of their minds and the casual stirrings of their thoughts and opinions as though they were knowledge itself. They composed books about them, exhausted their breaths on them, squandered their time over them, and filled pages with ink—and hearts with darkness—until a great number of them openly declared that there is no knowledge to be found in the Quran and the Sunnah, that their proofs are merely verbal and yield neither certainty nor true knowledge. Satan cried out this slogan among them, gave the call to it in their very midst, and made it reach the near and the far alike, whereupon hearts were stripped of knowledge and faith like a snake sloughing off its skin, or a garment slipping from the body of its wearer.

The eminent scholar Shams al-Dīn Ibn al-Qayyim said: “One of our companions told me about a follower of the students of these people. He saw him poring over some of their books even though he had not memorized the Quran. He said to him, ‘Had you memorized the Quran first, it would have been better!’ The man replied, ‘But is there any knowledge in the Quran?!’”

Ibn al-Qayyim also related: “One of their leading figures said to me, ‘We listen to hadith only for its blessing, not to derive knowledge from it, for others have already spared us that burden; our reliance is upon what they have understood and established.’”

Without doubt, anyone whose share of knowledge is no more than this is, as the poet said:
They camped in Mecca among the clans of Hāshim,
While I pitched my tent on the plain, the furthest of sites. (1)