“Another has committed the offence, yet I am the one you punish; it is as though I were the remorseful man’s forefinger.” End quote.

What causes real pain, however, is that his vehemence would at times be directed toward some of his own admirers from among Ahl al-Sunnah. Examples include:

(a) The severity he displayed while replying to his brother, the eminent scholar Ḥamūd al-Tuwayjrī—may Allah have mercy on him—in the introduction to the seventh edition of his book The Prophet’s Prayer Described.

(b) His rejoinder to the scholar Bakr b. ʿAbd Allah Abū Zayd in Tamām al-Minnah, the commentary on Fiqh al-Sunnah (p. 197), issued while refuting A Treatise on the Manner of Rising in Prayer and the Weakness of the Ḥadith of “Kneading.”

It should be noted that Shaykh Bakr had praised Shaykh al-Albānī in the preface to his treatise, saying on page 8: “the eminent scholar, the hadith expert, the shaykh, the Salafi.” End quote.

In fairness, al-Albānī later commended Shaykh Bakr in return; what comes to mind at present is the preface to volume 6 of Silsilat al-Aḥādīth al-Ṣaḥīḥah (pp. 5–6), where he once said of him: “our virtuous brother, the shaykh.”⦗1⦘ End quote.

(c) His response to his brother, Shaykh Muḥammad Nasīb al-Rifāʿī—may Allah have mercy on him.⦗2⦘

(d) And the harshness he showed toward his brother (and former friend), the esteemed Shaykh Abū Bakr Muḥammad Zuhayr al-Shāwīsh, proprietor of Maktab al-Islāmī.

This scarcely needs illustration, for in most of the prefaces to his new or revised works he targets Shaykh Zuhayr at the slightest pretext, and the same can be found scattered throughout his books. At times his remarks about his brother Zuhayr have no connection to the hadith under discussion or to its documentation, and sometimes no link at all can be discerned between his comments on Zuhayr and the passage in which they appear.⦗3⦘