the matter completely; instead of submitting their principles to the Sunnah, they subjected the Sunnah to their principles, accepting whatever agreed with those principles and rejecting whatever did not. By so doing they severed the full bond between the Muslim and the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—especially among the later generations. They ended up ignorant of the Prophet himself: of his creed, his life, his worship, his fasting, his night prayer, his pilgrimage, his rulings, and his legal verdicts. When asked about any of these issues they answer either with a weak report, a narration that has no foundation, or with whatever appears in such-and-such a school of law. Should it happen that their answer contradicts an authentic hadith and they are reminded of it, they pay no heed and refuse to return to it, clinging to objections that we need not discuss here. All of this springs from the very “principles” and “rules” already alluded to, some of which will soon be mentioned, Allah willing.

This plague has spread everywhere, flooding almost every Muslim land, scholarly journal, and religious book, save for rare exceptions. You will hardly find anyone issuing fatwas on the basis of the Quran and the Sunnah except a small, lonely handful. The great majority rely on one of the four madhhabs, and will even move beyond them whenever they imagine some “benefit” in doing so. As for the Sunnah, it has become for them a forgotten thing—unless their perceived interest happens to require appealing to it, as some of them did with the hadith of Ibn ʿAbbas on the pronouncement of triple divorce, which states that during the Prophet’s time it counted as a single divorce. They relegated that hadith to the standing of one of the weaker legal opinions, even though—before adopting it themselves—they had fought against it and against anyone who called people to it!