harm the Muslims or go looking for their private faults, for whoever pursues his brother’s fault, Allah will expose him even in the innermost part of his mother’s house.” This instruction concerns ordinary Muslims; how much more serious, then, is the matter when it involves the scholars?

Those who collect the slips of the scholars in order to spread them are not only wronging the scholars themselves; they are wronging the scholars personally, wronging the knowledge those scholars bear, and wronging the very Sharia that comes to people through them. When people no longer trust their scholars—having been shown what are alleged to be their flaws, which may in fact be no flaws at all except in the eye of a spiteful critic—their confidence in the scholars and in the knowledge they possess inevitably weakens. In effect, this becomes an assault on the religion they convey, namely the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.

For that reason, part of the sincere advice you owe to the leading scholars of the Muslim community is to defend their honor, conceal their shortcomings as far as you can, and not remain silent when you hear something about them. Rather, bring it to the scholar’s attention, discuss it with him, and ask him directly. Perhaps the report attributed to him is inaccurate. More than one false claim has been circulated about us and about others. People—may Allah grant us well-being—when driven by desire and fond of a particular view, will ascribe that view to a scholar whose words the public respects. Yet when you ask the very scholar to whom it was attributed, he will say, “Never—I did not say that.” The questioner himself may, for example, word his question poorly, and the scholar will answer only in proportion to