For this reason, Muslim scholars preserve accounts of people of learning and piety—the Companions, the Successors, and those who came after them, including leading scholars, men of piety, and just rulers—which acquaint people with these individuals, inspire praise and supplication for them, and ensure that they are remembered with honour. These accounts also convey something beneficial: either words from which others may benefit or righteous deeds in which they may follow their example. For scholars are the heirs of the prophets. The purpose concerning the prophets—may Allah Most High be pleased with them all—is to benefit from their words, the truths they conveyed, and their commands, and to follow their example in their deeds—may Allah’s blessings be upon them all.

As for those who have gone astray, such as Christians and the adherents of religious innovations, despite their excesses, their veneration of these figures’ graves and images, and their seeking intercession through them, they possess no accounts of these figures whose truth can be distinguished from falsehood. Rather, the two have become confused. Hardly any of their scholars can distinguish, within the religion they practise, between what came from the Messiah and what came from others, whether other prophets or their own religious teachers. Indeed, they have mixed truth with falsehood.

Likewise, among those who face the qiblah, the people of misguidance and religious innovation venerate a shaykh, a religious leader, or some other figure, associate him with Allah, invoke him besides Allah, seek his aid in distress, make vows to him, and make pilgrimages to his grave. They may even prostrate themselves before him and worship him more than they worship Allah, as Christians do. Yet they are among the most ignorant of his life and circumstances: they transmit loose reports about him with no chain of transmission