Intervention: He sometimes makes things up as he speaks, and they may well be incorrect, so I am not sure I should stay with him. Now that you have honoured us by coming, I would like to hear the proper guidance: should I continue listening to him, or should I stop?

Shaykh: Welcome, and may Allah bless you. Allow me—no offence meant—to presume that you are one of two kinds of people. Either you are the sort who, as they say nowadays, has an academic grounding in the Salafi creed. If that is so, and you know, for example, what is authentic and what is not among the hadith of the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—then when you listen to a man like this you can take benefit, just as you profited from his remark about the prayer. His words are captivating, and that is what makes the ordinary public gather around him when he gives a lecture and later when it is broadcast on television.

The second possibility is that you are a man who lacks that scholarly background and the religious insight we have been commanded to acquire in certain Qur’anic verses, such as His statement: “Say, ‘This is my path; I call to Allah upon clear insight— I and whoever follows me. Glory be to Allah, and I am not of the polytheists.’” (Yūsuf 12:108). If the person listening to that shaykh belongs to this second category, we fear that he may slip, for he has nothing by which to discern the shaykh’s right from his wrong.

I do not blame you for being impressed by him, for, as a poet has said:
You are not the first traveller guided by the moon.
There are many like you—even among our own brothers, such as this brother here and others, our Salafi brothers. You have heard this term, surely?

Intervention: Yes.