They have also reported from al-Wāqidī that he said:

“Ibrahim died on the tenth day, and on that very day the sun was eclipsed.”

All of this is baseless. By unanimous agreement al-Wāqidī is no authority even when he cites a chain of transmission—so how much less when the report is disconnected. Claiming that the eclipse occurred on the tenth is like saying that the new crescent was sighted on the twentieth of the month: the first is an obvious, recurring pattern anyone can observe, whereas the second is known only to those who have investigated it and understood the causes and courses of the two great lights.

Speaking without knowledge—whether in matters of Revelation or of reason—and the harm it causes:

No one has the right to speak without knowledge. Rather, one must beware of those who venture into the rulings of the Sacred Law without knowledge or into rational issues without knowledge. Some people, imagining that they were championing the Sharīʿah with their deficient intellects and corrupt analogies, only furnished the atheists—the enemies of the religion—with weapons against it; thus they neither supported Islam nor vanquished its foes.

Others claim that they possess the rational sciences and that these sciences may conflict with the Sharīʿah, while they are among