—the age of the Successors of the Successors—were these Muslims and others like them, who belonged to the praised third generation.

Al-Mu‘tamir ibn Sulaymān was also one of the distinguished imams, though he ranked below Hammād ibn Zayd. Imam Ahmad, Ishāq ibn Rāhawayh and others met him, and he was one of Imam Ahmad’s teachers. As for Hammād ibn Zayd, Imam Ahmad missed the opportunity to meet him. He said: “I missed Hammād ibn Zayd, so Allah compensated me with Ismā‘īl ibn ‘Ulayyah; and I missed Mālik ibn Anas, so Allah compensated me with Sufyān ibn ‘Uyaynah.”

As for Yahyā ibn Sa‘īd al-Qattān, he was one of the scholars of the Sunnah and the leading hadith scholar in assessing the authenticity of hadith, their hidden defects, their narrators and the accuracy of their transmission. Ahmad even said: “I have never seen anyone like him”—meaning in that discipline. ‘Alī ibn al-Madīnī learned this discipline from him, and al-Bukhārī, the compiler of al-Sahīh, learned it from ‘Alī. Al-Tirmidhī stated that he had never seen anyone equal to Muhammad ibn Ismā‘īl al-Bukhārī in knowledge of the hidden defects of hadith.

These eminent scholars denounced those who said that human speech and utterances are uncreated, when the Qadariyyah innovators emerged and claimed that the servants’ acts were not created by Allah: neither their words nor any of their other deeds, whether good or evil. Rather, they say: “These acts came into being; the servant brought them into being, but they were not created by anyone.” Or they say: “The servant created them, just as he brought them into being”; for they may disagree over affirming