do you mean by this hint?’

I replied, ‘Never has a real knower said, “O my Lord!” except that, before his tongue even moves, a resolve rises up from within him, turning neither right nor left, but shooting straight upward. Is there any stratagem by which this inborn upward resolve can be evaded? Tell us, then, how we may rid ourselves of “above” and “below.”’

I wept, and the congregation wept. The professor struck the dais with his sleeve and cried out, ‘Ah, the bewilderment!’ He tore off what he was wearing and stepped down; the mosque was in an uproar. He gave me no answer save, ‘My beloved, bewilderment, bewilderment—astonishment, astonishment!’

Afterwards I heard his students saying, ‘We heard him declare, “Al-Hamdānī has bewildered me.”’

Imām al-Harameyn died in 478 AH at the age of sixty. He was an ocean of knowledge in both fundamentals and subsidiary matters, his intellect burning bright.

308 – I say: The chain of transmission for this story is sound, linked entirely through ḥuffāẓ. Abū Jaʿfar’s name is Muḥammad ibn Abī ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad al-Hamdānī, d. 531 AH, whom Ibn Taymiyyah, in Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā 4/44, describes as ‘the gnostic shaykh.’

It seems to me that this bewilderment befell Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī before his creed settled upon the salafī way; indeed, it may have been the very starting-point that led to the stability he later declared in his Risālah Niẓāmiyyah.

Much the same occurred with his father, the scholar Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh ibn Yūsuf al-Juwaynī, who for a time was perplexed about the issue of istiwāʾ (the divine rising over the Throne) and other attributes, owing to the scholastic theology (kalām) he had taken from his teachers. Praise be to Allah, he eventually settled upon the salafī doctrine, as he himself explained excellently in his valuable treatise Affirming the Istiwaʾ and Exaltedness, printed in vol. 1 of Majmūʿ al-Rasāʾil al-Manīriyyah (pp. 170–187). I am astonished that al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Dhahabī overlooked this imām when listing the distinguished scholars who upheld the position of the salaf on this crucial matter—yet exalted is He who never forgets.

157 – Saʿd al-Zanjānī (381–471 AH)

338 – The imām, Abū al-Qāsim Saʿd ibn ʿAlī al-Zanjānī, the ḥadīth master who resided beside the Sacred Mosque, enjoyed immense honour within the sanctuary: whenever he left his house, people would kiss his hand even more often than they would