He also said elsewhere (p. 508/1467–1468):

“If a man speaks without a sound report or a valid analogy, he is closer to sin than the one who speaks while ignorant. After the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—no one has the right to make any declaration except on the basis of pre-existing knowledge. And the sources of knowledge, after the Book and the Sunnah, are consensus, transmitted reports, and the analogy I have described that is built upon them.”

One of the greatest calamities to have struck the learned among the Muslims—let alone the general public—is that most of them today, and indeed for centuries, are engulfed in total ignorance of what these texts from the Qur’an, the Sunnah, the reports of the Companions, and the statements of the imams actually teach: a censure of blind-following, its rejection as a form of knowledge, and the affirmation that true knowledge is only “Allah said” and “His Messenger said.” Hence it hardly occurs to anyone that the knowledge extolled in the Qur’an and the Sunnah is the knowledge of the beliefs and rulings they contain, and that the scholars who are praised therein are those who possess that knowledge—not those who merely know the opinions and ijtihad (independent reasoning) of later imams. As a result, you find them bewildered among those opinions, unable to discern which of them conforms to the Book and the Sunnah and which contradicts them.

Likewise, when one of them reads—for example—the prophetic narrations concerning the portents of the Hour in which “knowledge will be removed and ignorance will prevail,”⦗1⦘ it scarcely enters his mind that the “knowledge” of the blind-follower, which is in reality ignorance, is included in that prediction, for, as the imams have already made clear, he possesses no knowledge at all. Nor does he take notice at all when he hears the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—say: “Indeed, Allah does not seize knowledge …”