—in the words of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace—whoever elevates a single individual, treating that man’s legal verdicts as if they were themselves the revealed texts of the Law-giver—indeed, preferring them to those texts—and then places his statements above the words of every scholar of the Prophet’s community who came after him, content to imitate him and dispense with deriving rulings from the Book of Allah, the Sunnah of His Messenger, and the sayings of the Companions, while at the same time claiming—this blind follower, that is—that the man speaks only in accordance with the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger: such a stance entails testifying to what the witness does not know and speaking about Allah without knowledge. It also means informing against anyone who disagrees with him—even if the other is more learned—that he has failed to hit the mark of the Book and the Sunnah. He will say, “My imam alone is right,” or, “Both of them are right with respect to the Book and the Sunnah,” even though their statements clash; thus he portrays the proofs of the Book and the Sunnah as conflicting and contradictory, as though Allah and His Messenger were issuing simultaneously a ruling and its opposite, and as though the religion itself were subject to human opinions, with no definitive judgment capable of negating a claim. One or the other of these consequences is unavoidable—and such is one of the “blessings” that blind following (taqlīd) bestows upon its adherent.

Once this is understood, we affirm—as we have always affirmed—that Allah the Exalted has obligated His servants to fear Him in proportion to their ability. The essence of taqwā (God-consciousness) is to know what must be avoided and then to act accordingly. Every servant, therefore, is duty-bound to expend his utmost effort to learn what he must avoid of what Allah has commanded and forbidden, and then to commit himself to obeying Allah and His Messenger. As for what remains hidden from him, he shares the same standing as his peers, for every person other than the Messenger has been unaware of some part of what the Messenger brought, yet that ignorance does not remove him from being of the faithful