In sum, they possess the most perfect intellects, the fairest analogies, the soundest judgments, the most accurate discernment, the surest proofs, the most upright disputation, and the keenest intuitive insight … Then he says (p. 23):

“When we set the two groups side by side—the people of hadith and the practitioners of speculative theology—the critic who faults some hadith scholars and followers of the Sunnah for what he calls prolix padding is, in fact, censuring them either out of scant knowledge or scant understanding.

The first case is that they cite weak or fabricated hadiths, or depend on reports that are unfit as evidence.

The second is that they do not grasp the meaning of the authentic hadiths; indeed, they may voice two mutually contradictory statements and then be unable to resolve the conflict. The matter therefore returns to two possibilities: either they transmit—(the original reads: ziyādah, “an addition of”)—statements that bring no benefit, imagining them to be beneficial, like fabricated hadiths; or they transmit statements that are in fact beneficial but fail to understand them. For following a hadith requires, first, establishing its authenticity and, second, comprehending its meaning—just as following the Quran does. Ignorance creeps in when either of these two premises is neglected, and anyone who criticizes them does so on this very ground.

Undeniably, this is found among some of them: they advance fabricated hadiths in questions of creed and law, rely on concocted reports and unsound anecdotes, and quote from the Quran and the Sunnah passages whose meanings they do not understand—perhaps even construing them improperly and placing them where they do not belong.

Armed with this flimsy transmission and this feeble reasoning, they may declare prominent members of the ummah to be unbelievers, misguided, or innovators, and pronounce them ignorant. Thus, in some of them, there is both neglect of the truth and aggression against people: at times it is an excusable mistake, at times a reprehensible falsehood, and at times an innovation or deviation that warrants severe punishment. Only an ignorant or unjust person would deny that such things occur, and I myself have witnessed astonishing examples of it.

Yet, when set against others in this respect, they are like the Muslims in relation to the rest of the nations, and no—