17 – Al-Ṣābūnī likewise cited the Seven Jurists and, after them, a number of other leading scholars, listing many imams by name. He declared that they were all in complete agreement—none of them differing from another—and that nothing authentically transmitted from any one of them contradicts what we have just set forth.

18 – The noble Abū al-ʿAbbās Masʿūd ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid ibn Maṭar al-Hāshimī reported to us; al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū al-ʿAlāʾ Ṣāʿid ibn Sayyār al-Harawī informed us; Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Jurjānī informed us; Abū al-Qāsim Ḥamzah ibn Yūsuf al-Sahmī informed us; Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ismāʿīlī said:

“Know—may Allah have mercy on us and on you—that the doctrine of the people of hadith, the people of the sunnah and the community, is to affirm Allah, His angels, His books, and His messengers, and to accept everything stated in the Book of Allah, exalted is He, and all that has been reliably transmitted from the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. There is no turning aside from what those sources contain, nor any path to rejecting them, for they have been commanded to follow the Book and the sunnah, their guidance therein guaranteed, while their Prophet ﷺ bears witness that he leads to a straight path and warns that opposition to him brings temptation and a painful punishment.

They hold that Allah Most High is to be called upon by His most beautiful names and described with the attributes by which He has named and described Himself, and by which His Prophet ﷺ has described Him: He created Adam with His own hand; “both His hands are outspread—He spends as He wills” (Q 5:64), without entertaining any notion of how; and He “established Himself over the Throne,” without specifying how that establishment occurred.”