; he remains, in fact, one of the people of knowledge, and Allah has not charged him with more than he can bear in discerning the truth and adhering to it.

The Dangers of Blind Following and Its Harmful Effects on the Muslims:

Dear brothers, the peril of taqlid and the havoc it has wrought in our community are far too great to be fully set out in so brief a space. Specialised works have already covered the subject in detail, and whoever wishes a fuller explanation may consult them. My purpose here is only to show that taqlid is—indeed, may well be—the chief among the many causes that have turned Muslims away from following the Book and the Sunnah and from partisanship for them alone rather than for the men who are blindly followed. The various factions of the muqallids have declared taqlid obligatory—​as you have heard—​a religious path from which, they say, no one after the fourth century may depart. Anyone who does depart is branded with every sort of epithet, assailed with ruthless campaigns, and not spared accusations of things he never did, as all who have read some of the treatises written on the issue by both sides well know.

Now, many people today have never undertaken a serious study of what is called comparative fiqh, the kind of investigation that would reveal to a capable researcher how far the blind imitators have drifted from the Book and the Sunnah—indeed, even from the imams themselves—out of sheer partisanship for their school. Among them, regrettably, are doctorate-holders who lecture on this very subject. If that is the case, it should suffice for any one of them to recall the hadiths I mentioned in the first two chapters—​a mere handful out of the thousands that exist.