him—as some ignorant people do. Rather, one must show proper respect toward him, for he is one of the leading imams through whom this religion has been preserved and from whose efforts many subsidiary rulings have reached us. He will, in any case, receive a reward, whether he was right or wrong. By the same token, it is impermissible for his admirers to persist in clinging to those of his statements that run counter to the prophetic hadiths, because such statements are not truly part of his madhhab, as his own explicit words show. Those people are in one valley and these are in another, while the truth lies between them: “Our Lord, forgive us and our brothers who preceded us in faith, and do not place in our hearts any rancor toward those who believe. Our Lord, You are indeed Most Kind, Most Merciful.” (1) Al-Fulani, al-Iyqaz, p. 50; he also attributes the statement to Imam Muhammad, and then says: “This and what resembles it does not pertain to a mujtahid, for he has no need of anyone else’s view in that regard; rather, it concerns the muqallid.” I add: Building on this, al-Shaʿrani states in al-Mizan, 1/26: “If you ask: What should I do with the hadiths that were authenticated after my imam had died and which he therefore did not follow? The answer is that you ought to act upon them, for had your imam come across them and deemed them sound, he might well have ordered you to follow them; all of the imams are captives in the hands of the Sharia. Whoever does so has seized goodness with both hands. But whoever says, ‘I will not act on a hadith unless my imam has adopted it,’ misses out on much good, as is the case with many adherents of the legal schools. What is proper for them is to act upon every hadith authenticated after their imam, in fulfillment of the imams’ own counsel. We believe that if the imams had lived to see those authentic hadiths, they would have accepted them, practiced what they contained, and abandoned every analogy they had drawn and every opinion they had expressed.”