This hadith is among the important reports that urge Muslims to hold fast to the sunnah and to the sunnah of the four rightly guided caliphs and those who followed their way. It forbids every blameworthy innovation and declares it to be misguidance, even if people deem it good, as is authentically reported from Ibn Umar, may Allah be pleased with him. The hadiths prohibiting this are numerous and well known. Nevertheless, the great majority of Muslims today have turned away from them—both ordinary people and the learned, with the exception of only a few. Indeed, many of them consider investigating such matters to be trivial, and they claim that distinguishing the sunnah from blameworthy innovation provokes discord and divides the community. They counsel abandoning all of this, as well as refraining from offering sincere advice regarding every disputed matter, forgetting—or pretending to forget—that among the matters disputed between the adherents of the sunnah and the people of innovation is the very declaration of Allah’s oneness. They do not understand it to require worshipping Allah alone, or that no act of worship may be directed to any other than Him, exalted is He—such as seeking rescue and seeking aid from deceased saints and righteous persons—“though they think that they are doing good.”

Note: This authentic hadith is one of those declared weak by the so-called Hassan Abd al-Mannan, despite the agreement of hadith masters, both early and later, that it is authentic. He declared it weak through all its routes, although some are good and others authentic, as I have demonstrated in more than one place; its remaining routes only reinforce it further. Although he greatly exhausted himself tracing its routes and went to excessive lengths in declaring its individual reports weak, he ultimately demolished with his own hands most of what he had built, and graded the hadith authentic on account of its corroborating reports—excepting only a few of its clauses, including: “You must adhere to my sunnah and the sunnah of the rightly guided, guided caliphs after me.” This appears at the end of his little booklet, which he entitled A Dialogue with Shaykh al-Albani. Yet he was neither truthful nor fair in it; rather, he deceived readers, concealed the facts, and assailed the well-known hadith masters, accusing them of leniency and uncritical imitation, along with other disgraceful acts that there is no room to detail now—especially since I have addressed some of them in my new refutation of him, tracing his weakening of the authentic hadiths cited as evidence by Imam Ibn al-Qayyim, may Allah have mercy on him, in his book