He said:

“In contrast to those who falsely declare others unbelievers, there are people who do not understand the creed of Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah as they should, or who know some of it but remain ignorant of the rest. Even what they know of it they may fail to explain to people, concealing it instead. They do not forbid innovations that contradict the Book and the Sunnah, nor do they censure or punish those who follow innovations. Indeed, they may condemn all discussion of the Sunnah and the fundamentals of religion without distinction, failing to differentiate between what the Book, the Sunnah and scholarly consensus establish and what the people of innovation and division say. Or they allow everyone to retain their divergent doctrines, just as scholars are allowed their differing views in matters of independent scholarly judgment where disagreement is permissible.

This approach may predominate among many of the Murjiʾah and some of those engaged in jurisprudence, Sufism and philosophy, just as the former approach predominates among many followers of desires and speculative theologians. Both approaches are deviant and depart from the Book and the Sunnah.

Rather, the duty is to explain what Allah sent His messengers with and revealed in His Books, to convey what the messengers brought from Allah, and to fulfil the covenant Allah took from the scholars. One must therefore know what the messengers brought, believe in it, convey it, call others to it and strive in its cause. One must weigh against Allah’s Book and His Messenger’s Sunnah everything people have said and done concerning fundamental and subsidiary matters, inward and outward alike, without following desires arising from custom, a school of thought, a particular path, leadership or predecessors. Nor should one follow conjecture based on a weak hadith, an unsound inference—whether syllogistic or analogical—or imitation of someone whose words and actions one is not obliged to follow. For Allah has condemned in His Book those who follow conjecture and what their souls desire, abandoning the guidance that has come to them from their Lord.”1 End of quotation.

How closely the present resembles the past! How closely those whose approach Shaykh al-Islām has just described resemble these contemporaries of ours who call for silence about those who follow religious innovations and their own desires