“We affirm everything we have mentioned of their beliefs; this is what we incline to and adopt. Allah grants us success.”

He said:

“The foundations of this position are thus established by his own words—may Allah have mercy on him—namely, that he subscribes to these principles, which are the principles of [the people of] hadith, the foundation of their affirmation of Allah’s oneness, and the bedrock of their religion. In his writings, he sought only to present Allah’s proofs for His religion as he had described it, to expose the innovators’ errors, and to refute their falsehoods, so that the strength of truth and the Sunnah, and the weakness of falsehood and innovation, might be recognized. He did not originate a doctrine of his own in which the leading scholars of hadith among the people of the Sunnah and consensus had not preceded him. Rather, in certain passages he left wording unrestricted or qualified it to remove ambiguity, demonstrate the strength of the truth, clarify an argument, or dispel a misconception.

“This was also the intention of Shaykh Abū Muhammad, may Allah be pleased with him. He was unrivalled in his knowledge of hadith, its transmitters, and its chains of transmission. Despite his firm adherence to this, he held that hadiths whose wording concerning Allah’s oneness admits of ambiguity are like Quranic verses with similar ambiguity on that subject, and that they should be understood in the correct sense, consistent with the teaching of the Book and the Sunnah. Their aim was [only] to explain Allah’s proofs, show how they point to the truth, and expose the foundations laid by