is no different from its predecessors and is a photographic reproduction of them. Perhaps the reason for adding this was merely the publisher’s attempt to forestall the thieves who stole the book and printed it repeatedly without the permission of either the publisher or the author, thereby filling their bellies with fire. They have done the same with many of my books. The publisher therefore sought to distinguish the authorized edition from the pirated one—but to no avail, for, as the poet said:

Souls will not turn back from their wayward course
Until they have within them something that restrains.

It is for this reason that Allah Most High prescribed legal retaliation and mandated prescribed and discretionary penalties. How apt is the report from one of the early Muslims who said: “Allah restrains through governing authority what He does not restrain through the Quran.” He meant precisely those to whom we have referred—people who have neither morals nor any inner restraint to deter them from their waywardness, wrongdoing, and unlawful consumption of other people’s wealth. May Allah protect us from their evil.

That is the first issue.

As for the other issue, The Lawful and the Unlawful contains a considerable number of opinions and ideas adopted by the author—may Allah preserve him—that concern disputed matters. Some may accept them while others reject them, each according to his knowledge and understanding of the Quran and sunnah, his ability to distinguish authentic reports from weak ones, and his knowledge of the methods for drawing conclusions from the revealed proofs. These include his views concerning meat slaughtered by the People of the Book, images and keeping them, musical instruments and singing to their accompaniment, and other such questions. He alone is answerable for these views and will indeed be rewarded for them, whether he was right or mistaken.

It would never have occurred to me to point out anything of this kind had a certain blindly conformist Sufi preacher in one of the Syrian regions not taken me to task during a discussion between us in early (1397 AH). He objected because I had documented the hadiths in Commentary on the Tahāwī Creed while, as he alleged, remaining silent about some of the false doctrines it contained. He singled out for condemnation the doctrine of temporal events with no beginning. Although his words made it clear that he had not understood this doctrine and believed that it necessarily entailed affirming the eternity of the universe, I explained to him the distinction between the two and that a position’s logical implication is not itself the position held. I also showed him my comments on some of the book’s hadiths, in which I explicitly rejected the doctrine