and the Jahmiyyah,” while he was in prison, and wrote it in his own hand. This was not something he disclosed to his enemies, with whom someone else might have needed to practise dissimulation. This claim is more reprehensible than the Rāfidīs’ assertion that the reliably established words and deeds of the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAlī—may Allah be pleased with him—were acts of dissimulation. Imam Ahmad wrote a refutation of them and explained that they were heretics. What dissimulation towards them could there be, when he was striving against them with his explanations, his hand, his pen, and his tongue?

Section

These people’s specious argument rests on their finding that others had discussed “the letters of the alphabet” and “the names of created things.”

Those who profess adherence to the Sunnah discussed the letters of the alphabet as they occur outside the Quran and the divine scriptures. Some groups among them—such as Ibn Hāmid, Abū Nasr al-Sijzī, al-Qādī in the better-known of his two opinions, Ibn ʿAqīl, and others—said that they are created. They said: “Letters are of two kinds.”

Another view was held by groups comprising many people from Syria, Iraq, and Khurāsān, such as al-Qādī Yaʿqūb al-Barzabīnī and al-Sharīf Abū al-Fadā’il al-Zaydī al-Harrānī. This is also reported from Shaykh Abū al-Husayn ibn Samʿūn. It is the view of al-Qādī Abū al-Husayn, who also reported it as his father’s final position, and it is the view of Shaykh Abū al-Faraj al-Ansārī and Shaykh ʿAbd