claiming that perfection belongs to Allah alone and that this was a minor slip which does not deprive a scholar of the standing of reliability (1).

On other occasions he stated that Ibn al-Qayyim’s explicit report—namely, that his teacher, Shaykh al-Islam, had authored in this very question a well-known treatise that has not reached us (to the best of my knowledge), and that, had it been published, it would have shaken his opponents to the core—rests on no solid ground (2).

In yet another place he said,

“It seems more likely to me that it does not exist.” (3)

Elsewhere he referred to it as

“the so-called epistle.” (4)

When Dr. al-Harbi learned that Shaykh al-Albani had cited a fragment of a manuscript found among the holdings of Maktab al-Islami which explicitly attributes the book to Shaykh al-Islam—something that will be clarified below (5)—he sought to dismiss this attribution, saying:

“As for the three pages which al-Albani says he discovered loose among the manuscripts of Maktab al-Islami, which he reproduced in his introduction to Rafʿ al-Astār by al-Sanʿani, and which he claims are by an unknown scribe of the eleventh century AH from a treatise by Ibn Taymiyyah refuting those who assert that Paradise and Hell will perish, they cannot be regarded as one of Ibn Taymiyyah’s works. They fail to meet the criteria followed in recognized methods of research and textual criticism in this field, among them the anonymity of the copyist.” (6)