the Book and the Sunnah; likewise, they insist, those lay followers are permitted nothing but to imitate their imams. Such is the limit of their knowledge. Yet in this very issue they have unanimously opposed, on one side, the Book and the Sunnah, and on the other, the statements of their own imams. Worse still—adding straw to an already heavy bundle—they have gone on to imitate people whom, by their own principles, it is unlawful to follow, for those people are themselves imitators and belong to the late generations, as was shown earlier.

Taqlid (blind imitation) is not knowledge by the unanimous agreement of the scholars, as Ibn al-Qayyim states in I‘lam al-Muwaqqiʿin (1/51; 2/293). Abu al-Hasan al-Sindī relates at the beginning of his Gloss on Ibn Mājah, citing al-Suyūṭī, that “the imitator is not called a scholar.” Accordingly, the Ḥanafī jurist al-Marghīnānī, in Sharḥ al-Hidāyah (6/359), labels him “ignorant” and recounts the dispute over whether such a person may be appointed to the judiciary. Ibn al-Humām, in Fatḥ al-Qadīr, quotes Imām Muḥammad as saying that an imitator is not fit to serve as a judge.

How apt is the image coined by Imām al-Shāfiʿī for the imitator when he said:

The one who seeks knowledge with no proof
Is like a wood-gatherer in the depths of night:
He hoists a bundle of firewood—
Within it a viper that will strike him unawares.

Al-Bayhaqī recorded this in al-Madkhal (210-211) with a sound chain from him. (1)

Among the proofs they cite is the Prophet’s ﷺ statement:

“Allah does not take away knowledge by snatching it from His servants; rather, He takes away knowledge….”