“They do not seek ruqyah (protective or healing recitation),” and says in his comment on it (2/ 66):

“That is, they do not spy on people by listening … This practice is called istirāq al-samʿ (eavesdropping).”?!

That poor (clever fellow) did not realize that this verb derives from ruqyah, that its sīn indicates a request, and that it does not derive from sariqah (theft), in which the sīn is a root letter!

Let us now return to our original subject. We say:

These interpretations adopted by those later scholars were among the strongest reasons that prompted me to present the hadith of Abū Umāmah, may Allah be pleased with him, together with the additional details reported by other Companions, in one continuous account. This would make clear to anyone with eyes to see the invalidity of those interpretations and their conflict with the explicit wording of authentic hadiths. It would also show that those who reinterpret them seek only to evade these hadiths and belief in them through a devious approach that makes ordinary people imagine they believe in them. In reality, however, they disbelieve in the realities they describe and believe only in their wording!

By Allah, belief in all the texts through symbolism and reinterpretation is not worth a penny and avails nothing before Allah.

I would dearly like to know: what difference is there between these scholars who identify with the Sunnah, yet deny the import of these mass-transmitted texts concerning the emergence of the Dajjāl, the descent of Jesus, peace be upon him, and his killing of the Dajjāl—and the Bātiniyyah (esotericists) and misguided sects who believe in the texts of the Quran and Sunnah,