Thus, al-Sha‘rāwī is comparable—though certainly with differences—to another preacher by the name of Kishk; you must have heard of him. Both of them are public storytellers by nature: they draw crowds around them, and people find their speech entertaining. Yet no matter how many of those gatherings a listener attends, ask him after years: “What knowledge have you actually acquired about what is lawful and unlawful, disliked and recommended, and the rest of the Sharīʿah rulings?” You will find that he has gained absolutely nothing. All he possesses are anecdotes—mere tales, as people say—and he feels perfectly content and reassured. … But in the end he emerges from those lessons empty-handed; before anything else, his creed itself is never corrected—and the present example before us makes that plain.
There are other instances that I do not wish to enter into now. Were you to ask the general public—let alone the scholars—“Whose speech is the Qur’an?” every Muslim would say, “The speech of Allah.” Yet if you were to discuss the matter with al-Sha‘rāwī and others like him among the Ashʿarīs and the Muʿtazilites, they would circle you about until they pull you away from this belief, claiming that the Qur’an is not the speech of Allah. They will not state it openly, of course, lest their foul stench be exposed. The Qur’an is the speech of Allah: “And Allah spoke to Moses directly” (al-Nisāʾ 4:164). It is like the Torah and the Gospel—scriptures Allah revealed to His chosen, noble messengers.
The point is that the creed which ought to be taught by every scholar on every occasion is precisely what al-Sha‘rāwī and Kishk never address. Come down to the next level: have you ever heard al-Sha‘rāwī explain to the people how to perform the prayer commanded in His words, “And establish prayer, give zakah, and bow with those who bow” (al-Baqarah 2:43)? He certainly exhorted you—may Allah reward him, that cannot be denied—and he never asked whether you actually pray or not, and so on, as you yourself mentioned. But did he tell you how you should pray? I can tell you beforehand: no. Why? If