—in Damascus some fifteen years ago—and it had a salutary effect in curbing the spread of the aforesaid view and in embarrassing its championers and publicists within intellectual circles. Allah then facilitated its publication under the title “The Obligation to Accept the Solitary Ḥadīth in Creed,” as booklet number 5.

As for the fourth and final chapter of the present treatise, the author turns to the third—and gravest—factor that has weakened the Sunnah’s standing among people and led them to neglect acting upon it: taqlid (blind imitation). For centuries this practice swept across every field of thought and life in the Muslim world, settling heavily upon minds and souls, stifling originality, killing genius, burying talent, and—among other losses—depriving people of their Lord’s guidance. It kept them from benefiting from the good that reached them through Muhammad ﷺ because they clung to the ijtihād of jurists who themselves never consented to being imitated without insight. Rather, each of those scholars advised posterity not to place any statement, opinion, ijtihād, or fatwa that contradicts the word of Allah and the word of His Messenger ahead of the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger, and to retract such views both during their lifetimes and after their deaths.

At the close of the lecture our teacher urged the Muslim youth to return to the Qur’an and the Sunnah in everything that comes to them from the two sources, and to strive—according to their ability and means—to realize within themselves the rank of true following.