knowledgeable or affirming the manifest truth in this matter. For the alternative is either to lack knowledge and say nothing, or to believe the opposite of the truth and utter what is false. Both are impossible.

As for the first possibility, anyone whose heart possesses even the slightest life and desire for knowledge, or eagerness for worship, will make investigating this matter, asking about it, and knowing the truth concerning it among his foremost aims and greatest pursuits. I mean clarifying what ought to be believed, not knowing how the Lord is or how His attributes are. Sound souls yearn for nothing more than knowledge of this matter. This is known through innate, inward awareness. How, then, could such a powerful motive—one of the strongest motives of all—fail to produce its effect among those eminent people throughout all their generations? This would scarcely occur even among the most dull-witted people, those most averse to Allah and most absorbed in pursuing worldly gain and heedless of remembering Allah Most High. How, then, could it occur among them?

As for their having believed or asserted something other than the truth in this matter, no Muslim, nor any rational person acquainted with their circumstances, would believe this.

Moreover, their recorded statements on this subject are too numerous to set down in this fatwa or even in a work many times its length. Anyone who has sought them out and traced them knows this. Nor can the later generations be more knowledgeable than the earlier ones, as some foolish people may claim—people who have failed to appreciate the worth of the early generations, and indeed have not truly known Allah, His Messenger, and those who believe in him as they are commanded to know them—when they say: “The way of the early generations is safer