Ruling on designating the most virtuous person of the age as “the qutb and the ghawth”

If, by saying

“the qutb, the ghawth, the solitary, the all-encompassing,”

a speaker merely means a man who happens to be the most virtuous person of his time, that is within the realm of possibility. Yet it is equally possible that in the same era there may be two individuals equal in merit, or three, or even four. One cannot claim with certainty that in every age there is only one person who surpasses all others, for a group may excel one another in certain respects while falling short in others, and those various aspects of merit may be close or identical.

Even supposing there is, in a given era, one man who is indeed the best of his contemporaries, labeling him

“the qutb, the ghawth, the all-encompassing”

is an innovation for which Allah has revealed no proof. None of the earliest generations of this community, nor its leading Imams, ever used such terms, and they have continually