and they plunged in alongside those who plunged, entered the arena of the bewildered, and devised arguments that ran contrary to the Book and the sunnah, seeking thereby to prevail and to subdue those who opposed their doctrine.

They then made these arguments a matter of religion and creed, after they had merely been tools of disputation and rebuttal. They declared astray those Muslims who did not believe in them, claimed affiliation with the sunnah and the community, and branded whoever disagreed with them as ignorant and foolish. Those who had no firm grounding in knowledge of the sunnah, and who had not striven to seek it because of the hardship involved, responded to them. Instead, they sought ease and comfort for themselves, contenting themselves with its name rather than its true reality, in their haste to attain leadership, to become renowned among the common people, and to be called leaders of the People of the Sunnah.

They made it their habitual practice to disparage the transmitters of reports and to discourage people from practicing their religion according to the transmitted traditions, because of their ignorance of their chains of transmission, the difficulty of grasping their meanings, and the inadequacy of their understanding of the ways in which they bear upon the Sacred Law and of the forms of religious observance founded upon them. Thus the marks of the noble laws were effaced, as were the ancient meanings of Islam; compendia of analogies and specious doubts were opened, while the proofs of the Book and the sunnah were set aside. Those who had practiced their religion according to their proofs, accepting them from trustworthy authorities, holding fast to both out of devoted concern, and guarding their hearing from these innovations