the later Ashʿarīs. He said, “I would recite it back to him, and the one who heard me was Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh al-Arminī. He said, ‘What is this, Ibrāhīm?’ I replied, ‘This is what my teacher taught me.’ He said, ‘Ibrāhīm, abandon this. I have travelled throughout the earth and met so many friends of Allah, yet I have not found a single one of them holding this belief. Rather, I found them holding the belief of these people.’” He pointed to his neighbours, the righteous adherents of hadith and the Sunnah from Jerusalem who lived there at that time.

Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abī Bakr ibn Qiwām also told me, “I heard my grandfather, Shaykh Abū Bakr ibn Qiwām, say, ‘If you hear about the people of such-and-such a place’—Shaykh Muhammad named it to me—‘if you hear that among them is a believer or a righteous man, believe it. But if you hear that among them is a friend of Allah, do not believe it.’ I asked, ‘Why, my master?’ He replied, ‘Because they are Ashʿarīs.’” This is a broad subject.

Anyone who examines the creeds of the renowned shaykhs, such as Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir, Shaykh ʿAdī ibn Musāfir, Shaykh Abū al-Bayān al-Dimashqī, and others