Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, or Imām al-Shāfiʿī, or any of the other great imams. This signals an enormous peril unless Allah comes to the aid of the ummah with scholars who are firmly established, possessed of robust learning and cogent evidence.

For that reason we hold that, in our day, pursuing sacred knowledge is the finest of the communal good deeds—better than giving charity and better than fighting in battle. In truth, it is itself a form of jihād, for Allah has placed it on a par with striving in His path. I do not mean the kind of fighting clouded by suspicions, where people doubt the sincerity of those who take up arms; rather, I am speaking of the genuine jihād in which you know with certainty that the combatants are striving so that the word of Allah may reign supreme, applying that principle to themselves before confronting anyone else. That authentic jihād—where warriors fight so that the word of Allah is exalted—is matched by the pursuit of Islamic knowledge. The proof is His statement: “It is not for the believers to march out all together. If only a group from every clan were to go forth, while others remained behind to gain a deep understanding of the religion and to warn their people when they return to them, so that they may take heed” (At-Tawbah 9:122). Thus, Allah set the quest for knowledge alongside true jihād in His cause, the jihād which, by the indicators of circumstances and the state of its fighters, is clearly undertaken so that the word of Allah be uppermost.

The point is that the avenues of goodness are many, and—after the obligatory duties that Allah has prescribed—the most excellent of them, in my estimation, is seeking sacred knowledge. Today we are in critical need of it. We recently received a question from someone who claimed that anyone who performs the prayer in the mosques of a certain town has an invalid prayer because some of the donors who built those mosques were allegedly involved in such-and-such