that are prescribed, some are always obligatory or recommended, such as the five daily prayers, the witr prayer, and the two rakahs before the dawn prayer. Others are prescribed in certain circumstances, when obligations cannot be fulfilled and prohibited acts cannot be prevented without them.
The Seventh Aspect:
It may be said: Regarding the mention of the Rightly Guided Caliphs from the pulpit, praying for the ruler of the time, and similar matters, when scholars—men of knowledge and religion who speak in accordance with(1) the evidence of the revealed law—address these matters, their words are accepted. Whoever among them is correct receives two rewards, while whoever errs receives one reward for the good he has done, and his error is forgiven.
But when this practice is condemned by those who replace it with something worse—such as the followers of Ibn Tūmart, who was claimed to be the recognized Mahdī and the infallible imam—who would mention him by name from the pulpit, ascribe to him qualities known to be false, declare his faction to be the elite of the nation of Muhammad—peace and blessings be upon him—and, at the same time, cease mentioning Abū Bakr, Umar, Uthmān, and Alī, the Rightly Guided Caliphs and rightly guided imams(2), whose being the best and most excellent members of this nation is established by the Book(3), the sunnah, and the consensus of the earliest forerunners and those who followed them with excellence(4), and who were the Rightly Guided Caliphs and rightly guided imams during the best of generations; and when these Tūmartīs then sought to defend this by arguing that mentioning the four caliphs was not a sunnah but an innovation—their assertion was to be rejected in the strongest terms, especially when they themselves mentioned their imam(5), Ibn