Whoever is fair-minded and avoids excess will realise that this is the way of the devout, early and late. Whoever departs from it is ruined, branded an obstinate ignoramus, even though people may rank him among the great. The furthest one can go in excusing certain shaykhs who prohibited the gesture and judged it makruh (disliked) is to say that the relevant hadiths never reached them. Because they encountered both reports for performing and omitting the gesture, they thought leaving it preferable. He continued: “When someone ignorant of the prophetic reports and the chosen traditions saw that some people point in obedience to the sunnah while others omit the gesture—whether out of ignorance, indolence, or heedlessness—he declared: ‘Omitting it is better, for it is an extra motion beyond the essential meaning.’ After him another came and said, ‘It is makruh.’ He meant merely a tanzih dislike, but failed to clarify; those who followed imagined it to be haram and deemed it a grave religious offence, assuming that an unrestricted use of makruh always indicates prohibition. Then a later writer added, ‘Whatever is makruh is haram according to Muhammad [ibn al-Hasan], all the more so because the matter concerns worship of the One!’ See how ignorance advanced step by step—uninformed reasoning stripped of transmitted evidence—until a well-known sunnah was turned into something considered forbidden and abandoned. Know that haram is defined as what is proven forbidden by decisive proof from the Quran or authentic hadith, and that one of the established principles is that declaring a permissible act impermissible is itself impermissible—how much more so when the act is an authenticated sunnah of the Prophet! Moreover, Kaydani’s disparagement of the hadith scholars—who are the backbone of the imams of this religion—implied by his phrase “like the hadith folk,” is by itself sufficient grounds for charging him with unbelief. Such insolence leads to ill manners that portend an evil end, for it is well known that the people of the Quran are Allah’s people, and the people of hadith are the people of the Messenger of Allah. A verse recited on this theme states: “The hadith folk are the Prophet’s very own; though they never shared his person, they shared his every breath.”