nor the believers in Him with the sound, obligatory knowledge—yet they go on to assert, “the way of the salaf is the safer course, whereas the way of the khalaf[1] is more learned and more judicious.”

Their mistake stems from imagining that the path of the salaf consists of nothing but accepting the bare wording of the Qur’an and the hadith, without any understanding—much like unlettered folk—while the path of the khalaf, in their view, is to extract meanings from the texts by wrenching them away from their realities through all sorts of figurative devices and exotic turns of phrase.

This corrupt notion produced that statement whose substance is to fling Islam behind one’s back. They have lied outright about the way of the salaf and gone astray in declaring the way of the khalaf correct, thus combining two falsehoods: ignorance of the way of the salaf, shown in fabricating claims about them, and ignorance and misguidance in endorsing someone else’s approach.

He then supported this with the words of al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Rajab in his book The Superiority of the Knowledge of the Salaf over that of the Khalaf; whoever wishes may consult it.

The same false assumption that misled the objectors is repeatedly voiced by certain advocates of the khalaf over the salaf, and some Muslim writers who are unfamiliar with the statements of the salaf naively take it to be correct. They call it “tafwīḍ” (consigning the meaning), and it is something al-Kawtharī often attributes to the salaf—falsely. In his commentary on al-Sayf al-Ṣaqīl, p. 13, he says: “What the salaf followed was to let whatever is reported in the Book and the well-known Sunnah concerning Allah’s attributes pass across the tongue, while proclaiming His transcendence, without delving into the meaning or determining what is intended!”

He repeats this claim elsewhere, on pp. 131 and 145, and his associate—who cooperated with him in tampering with the passages of al-Bayhaqī’s al-Asmāʾ wa l-Ṣifāt—adopts the same approach: the former in his annotations, the latter in the preface he penned for the work he entitled Furqān al-Qurʾān between the Attributes of the Creator and the Attributes of Created Things, namely Shaykh Salāmah al-Qudaʿī.