blind imitation, while you pretend that you do not engage in blind imitation. This would be obligatory if you were among those knowledgeable in the Quran and the sunnah, and in the principles of hadith and jurisprudence. Yet we see no trace of this in all that you write—only the amassing of material without any verification or scrutiny. What is incumbent upon you, therefore, is to follow the evidence; that is undoubtedly better for you than undermining and declaring weak hundreds of hadiths that the scholars have deemed authentic. They may even reach into the thousands if you persist in opposing “the way of the believers.”

I am virtually certain that the man is driven by personal bias and an ulterior motive—Allah knows it best. His manner of documenting hadiths has shown us this: he is exceedingly energetic and goes to every possible length in the aforementioned weakening of reports. He hunts down the less weighty opinions that assist him in this, while deceiving readers by omitting the views that oppose him and referring them to certain studies that contradict his own position! But when a hadith is strong and he finds no way to declare it weak and demolish it, that energy turns into lethargy and indolence. He then discusses its status in an inadequately brief manner, without explaining the reason, as when he says, for example (1/130): “A good hadith, if Allah wills!” He then fills five lines in documenting it, without any worthwhile benefit, giving his readers the impression that he is a thorough and critical researcher. Yet they do not know what he means by qualifying its being good with the divine will: is it intended to cast doubt, or to confirm it? The former is more fitting for one bent on weakening authentic hadiths! He has other hadiths of this kind (pp. 220, 292, and 294); see also pp. 183, 212, 224, 272, 277, and 297.

Furthermore, his statement concerning Salim ibn Abi al-Jaʿd—that he transmitted reports with omitted links from a number of the Companions—does not establish a break in the chain here. For they explicitly stated that he had not lived to meet them, or had not heard from them, while Salim is not among those. In that case, it must be understood as a connected chain according to the position of the majority, which is the stronger view, as previously established.