around me—not to mention my own family and people—except for a few of them. Then Allah, out of His bounty and generosity and without anyone among them directing me, enabled me to study hadith and the sunnah, both in their principles and their jurisprudence. This was after I had studied with my father and other shaykhs some Hanafi jurisprudence and what are known as the ancillary disciplines, such as syntax, morphology, and rhetoric, after graduating from the al-Is'af al-Khayri Elementary School.
I then began calling my brothers and friends around me to correct their creed, abandon madhhab partisanship, beware of weak and fabricated hadiths, and revive the sound sunnahs that even their elite had allowed to fall into neglect. Among these was holding the two Eid prayers at the open prayer-ground in Damascus. Our brothers later revived this practice in Aleppo, and then in other parts of Syria; this sunnah continued to spread until some of our brothers revived it in Amman, Jordan. I also warned people against building mosques over graves and praying there, and wrote on the subject my book, Warning the Worshipper against Taking Graves as Mosques. I startled my people and the people of my new homeland with matters they had never heard before. I stopped praying in the Umayyad Mosque, even though some of my relatives used to go there, because it contains the grave of John, as they claim!
In this cause, I endured from relatives and strangers alike what every caller to the truth endures—one who does not fear, for Allah’s sake, the reproach of any reproacher. I wrote several treatises against certain ignorant fanatics, and I was imprisoned twice because they denounced me to the nationalist and Ba'athist authorities, and because I told some of them, when asked: “I do not support the ruling regime, because it is contrary to Islam.” This proved good for me and a means for my call to spread.
Allah also enabled me to travel in calling to Allah’s oneness and the sunnah in many regions of Syria and Arab lands, and then in some European countries, emphasizing that Muslims have no deliverance from the colonialism, humiliation, and disgrace that have befallen them, nor is there any benefit in groupings