to a greater extent; and every good found among others is found among them in a higher and greater degree. The same holds for the people of hadith in relation to others.

This can be explained as follows: the unprofitable excess of words mentioned above, believed to provide a path to conceptual understanding and assent to propositions, is many, many times more prevalent among adherents of speculative theology and logic than among the people of hadith. The people of hadith’s reliance on weak hadiths is matched by the theologians and logicians’ reliance on numerous fruitless definitions and syllogisms that yield no knowledge, but rather ignorance and misguidance. The people of hadith’s discussion of hadiths whose meaning they do not understand is matched by the theologians and logicians’ laboured pronouncements without knowledge, which are still greater and more numerous. How aptly Imam Ahmad said:

“A weak hadith is better than the opinion of so-and-so.”

Moreover, the people of hadith have this advantage: the statements they repeat, though some of them do not understand them, are true in themselves, and they believe in them. The speculative theologians, by contrast, labour to make statements that they neither understand nor know to be true. The people of hadith do not use a weak hadith to overturn a major foundational principle of the Sharia; they use it either to support such a principle or in a subsidiary matter. Those others, however, invoke faulty definitions and syllogisms to overturn true, established foundational principles.

With this understood, Allah Most High said concerning the followers of religious leaders who oppose the messengers:

“When their messengers came to them with clear proofs, they rejoiced in the knowledge they possessed.”

And He Most High said: