examples and proofs. They furnish conclusive evidence to every fair-minded person who neither shows favouritism nor evades the issue that this man is not to be trusted in his learning, nor is he reliable in what he transmits. Rather, he is self-deluded, indifferent to his مخالفة? [No—must not Arabic.] Rather, he is self-deluded, indifferent to his violation of scholarly principles or to the statements of the imams who were hadith masters and critics. Indeed, his very attitude says: “They are men, and we are men!” We have heard this repeatedly from some ignorant people.

One manifestation of his self-delusion and conceit over his learning is that, in the introduction to his Da'ifah (Weak Hadith Collection), he expressed the wish that I would come round to agreeing with him in his declarations of weakness—just as his teacher Shu'ayb came round and agreed with him regarding approximately one hundred hadiths from it, as he himself stated immediately afterward. I believe that he exaggerated in this, for I have seen the shaykh, in some of his annotations, differ with certain things attributed to him. I say this merely to state the facts, not to exonerate the shaykh; for we know him to have rejected certain authentic hadiths, such as the hadith, “If a fly falls ...,” and similar reports. Thus, this man wants me to be like him in dismantling the authentic sunnah, whereas, by Allah’s grace, I am one who supports it and defends it against the ignorance of the ignorant and the false claims of the falsifiers.

Moreover, what encouraged me to respond to him in this corrective note—besides the unavoidable duty of making the truth clear and enlightening those who may be deceived by the abundance of his words and his truncated citations—was that his admiration for his own opinion, his persistence in error, and his arrogant rejection of the truth became clear to me during a discussion between him and me on the first night of Ramadan this year (1412), concerning his declaration that the hadith of al-Irbad was weak, in the presence of several worthy individuals. I put certain questions to him, and his answers made it clear to us that he has no knowledge of this discipline or its related matters—to the point that he does not even accept the scholars’ maxim: “The one who affirms is given precedence over the one who denies,” or similar scholarly principles. For this reason, he gives unqualified precedence to disparagement over accreditation, to declaring a narrator unknown over declaring him trustworthy, and to declaring a hadith weak over authenticating it—indeed, to his own ignorance over the knowledge of others! He does not accept any scholar’s statement that a weak hadith has another chain that strengthens it, nor that scholar’s ruling that it is established, unless he himself finds it and approves of it. Consequently, he conceals and suppresses it, along with other matters which I am presently unable to enumerate.

I say this as a warning to readers against the harm he does to the sunnah, and as sincere counsel to him, since he is our brother in