is like my superiority over the least of you,” reported by al-Tirmidhi1. He also said, “When the son of Adam dies, his deeds are cut off except for three: a continuing charity, knowledge from which people benefit, or a righteous child who prays for him,” reported by Muslim. And he said, “He is not one of us who does not honor our elder, show mercy to our young, and acknowledge the right of our scholar,” reported by al-Hakim2.

There are many other verses and ḥadiths praising knowledge and its people. Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr therefore devoted a special chapter to this reality in his Jāmiʿ Bayān al-ʿIlm (2/23) entitled, “Chapter on identifying the foundations and reality of knowledge, and on what the terms fiqh and knowledge apply to without restriction.” The eminent scholar al-Fulānī followed suit in his work Iqāẓ Himmam Ulī al-Absār (pp. 23–26). Both authors placed under that heading several reports that illustrate the point, and al-Fulānī concluded:

“I say: These ḥadiths and reports state explicitly that the word ‘knowledge’ applies only to what is found in the Book of Allah, the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah, the consensus, or to what is analogically derived from these foundations when no explicit text is available, according to those who permit that. It most certainly does not refer to what the devotees of blind-following and partisanship restrict themselves to when they confine knowledge to the sectarian books of opinion—even if some of that happens to coincide with prophetic texts.”

In sum, imitation (taqlīd) is blameworthy because it is ignorance, not knowledge; true knowledge is knowledge of the Book and the Sunnah and a deep understanding of them.