his leadership, after they had gathered at his house, with me and some of our brothers from Damascus present. All of them advised him and asked him to stop imposing his opinion and obstinately insisting upon it, and to cooperate with all his brothers—especially the longtime members and those among them versed in fiqh. But he refused. They therefore removed him from his leadership and appointed someone else over them—while they were in his own house!
Thereafter, whenever his former companion was mentioned, he would disparage him and attribute to him things that were not true of him, even though, as far as we know—and Allah is his Reckoner, for we do not declare anyone pure before Allah—he is known among his brothers for his sincerity, religious devotion, understanding of fiqh, and zeal for the daʿwah. For this reason, I cut off my connection with him: I neither visit him nor does he visit me. Although he shows me affection and reverence whenever he meets me, I turn away from him, until he repents to his Lord for what he has done and apologizes to his brother for his mistreatment of him. To Allah belongs the final outcome of all matters.
Although he left his hometown of Aleppo and the group likewise left him, as mentioned above, he still declares in Saudi Arabia that he is the leader of the group. Indeed, he even claims to be the founder of the Salafi daʿwah. He did so in his book al-Tawassul, and I criticized him in my book Tawassul: Its Types and Rulings (pp. 91–93). He replied to me in the second edition of the aforementioned book in a manner that makes it apparent to the discerning reader that he had come to recognize the soundness of my criticism, yet he did not make this known.
The clearest proof of this is that, in its second edition, he qualified his former title, saying of himself—himself!—that he was “the founder of the Salafi daʿwah in Aleppo,” without mentioning that he had benefited from the criticism to which I referred. He interpreted his statement, “founder,” in the way I had suggested in my critique: namely, that perhaps he meant “reviver of the Salafi daʿwah.” He then spoke at length, but his remarks did not go beyond that aforementioned interpretation. I only wish that he had explicitly said, “the reviver of the Salafi daʿwah in Aleppo,” for then his brothers would not have agreed with him in this, since they know that he is not qualified for it. It is enough for him to be a follower of one of the revivers, as I stated there.
His aforementioned book is the greatest testimony to what I say, for it is filled with scholarly errors of various kinds, as well as weak and inarticulate expression; and his discussion of this hadith