He said: “Al-Shāfi‘ī, Mālik, Abū Hanīfa, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Sufyān al-Thawrī, and all the imams of the early generations held it to be forbidden.”

He then cited statements from them.

He said: “The scholars of hadith among the early generations agreed on this, and their stern warnings against it are too numerous to recount. They said: ‘The Companions refrained from discussing it—despite their greater knowledge of the realities and their greater eloquence in expressing them—only because they knew the evil it would engender.’”

Section: The Beliefs of the Sufi Masters as Presented by Shaykh Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī in His Well-Known Epistle

He cites scattered statements of theirs as evidence that