to every age—meaning that anyone who lives long enough will inevitably witness change—or was it meant only for those to whom the Messenger ﷺ was speaking? We say: it applies to every age. Those of us whose lives have been prolonged can attest to the vast difference between the early and the later parts of our lifetimes. Whoever has been granted a long span has seen tremendous changes in people, for—just as the Prophet ﷺ said, “Whoever among you lives long will witness much disagreement”—that prophecy has indeed come to pass. The community has differed in politics, in doctrine, in conduct, and in practical rulings. Yet, when this divergence arose, the Messenger ﷺ urged us to hold fast to one single path, declaring: “Adhere to my Sunnah and the Sunnah of the rightly guided caliphs; cling to it with your molars.”

Thus the Prophet ﷺ commanded us—when we see such disagreement—to cleave to his Sunnah, saying, “ʿAlaykum bi-sunnatī” (“Commit yourselves to my Sunnah”). The grammarians explain that the phrase ʿalaykum here, though literally a preposition with a pronoun, functions as an imperative: “Hold fast to my Sunnah.”

His Sunnah is the way he trod—belief, character, action, worship, and everything else. We must adhere to it and refer our judgments back to it, as Allah the Exalted says: “But no—by your Lord—they will not believe until they make you the judge in all that arises between them; then they will find within themselves no discomfort regarding what you have decided and will submit in full submission” (Qur’an 4:65). The Prophet’s Sunnah, then, is the path of salvation for anyone whom Allah wills to rescue from disputes and innovations. Praise be to Allah, it has been preserved in the works of the scholars who compiled the Sunnah—such as the two Ṣaḥīḥ collections of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, the Sunan, the Musnads, and other compilations in which the scholars safeguarded the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.