Gifts of Knowledge

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Glorifying People’s Opinions Led to the Neglect of the Sunnah

If what drove the Rāfiḍah and those deceived by them to adopt that hostile stance was the hatred concealed within their corrupt souls toward the Companions of the Messenger ﷺ, their evil opinion of the Messenger ﷺ, their failure to truly believe in him, their belief that the angels are not infallible, and, finally, their failure to esteem the Lord of the Worlds as He deserves to be esteemed—if these were the things that drove them to such a position, then what, one may ask, drove some of these other people who are engaged in religious scholarship to adopt such harshness and turn away from the Sunnah, treating it as though they had no need of it?!

The answer which appears to me to be what drove these people to this was their excessive veneration and sanctification of the opinions of men and their regarding those opinions as a religion through which one worships the Lord of the Worlds. This extremism led to them harbouring poor assumptions about the texts of the Quraan and Sunnah. They claimed that these texts are read and listened to merely to attain blessing from their words, rather than for guidance by implementing the rulings contained in them!

It is certainly true that these are blessed texts. The Book of Allaah is a blessed Book, “And this is a blessed Book which We have sent down.” [6:155]

And if Muslims were to learn their Lord’s Book and their Prophet’s Sunnah and act upon them: making ḥalāl what they make ḥalāl, and forbidding what they make ḥarām, and applying their rulings to their public and private lives they would attain a blessing beyond their expectations, just as their predecessors attained it by truly believing in them. 

Indeed, if the Muslims today were to do this, their present life of ignorance would be transformed into a blessed Islamic life: a life of security and prosperity, a life of mercy, in which they would enjoy dignity, strength, protection, and honour. They would recover everything that had been taken from them, both material and non-material. Their unity would be restored, and they would attain victory and triumph. This is the blessing that one should expect from believing in the Book and the Sunnah.

As for the ‘blessing’ which assumes a house will receive abundant provision simply because the Noble Quraan or Ṣaḥīḥ Al-Bukhārī is read inside it, and that this house will be saved from fires, or from becoming overcome by an enemy, sudden snake bites, and other daily accidents, we say to them: the Quraan was not revealed for this purpose, nor was the Sunnah inspired to the Prophet ﷺ for this purpose. Not so fast, O people!

According to these people—the ‘barakah people [al-barakatiyyūn]’—the texts are detached from the public and private lives of Muslims, and the sources of rulings are the opinions of men, and it is these opinions that one goes back to. The followers of every school of thought [madhhab] must refer only to the opinions of the scholars of their madhhab if they want to know a certain ruling. They believe that the entire religion is what is found in those books, which are essentially collections of men’s opinions, their independent reasoning [ijtihād], personal preferences, and analogies [qiyās]. You might read some of these books which some of them consider to be ‘encyclopaedias’ from cover to cover and hardly come across a single ḥadīth or āyah quoted by the author to support a ruling.

I would not be exaggerating if I said that this fanaticism toward the madhhabs is what has prevented many Muslims from understanding the Sunnah as they should. It is also one of the causes of the Muslims’ division and fragmentation, and consequently one of the causes of their having fallen behind and of their enemies gaining power over them. For they have contradicted the Book of their Lord, which is their source of honour and strength, and which calls out to them, “… hold firmly together to the rope of Allaah and do not be divided.” [3:103] They reached a point where the one Ummah has become like people belonging to different religions, each party rejoicing in what it has.

This religious division, if we may call it that, has had a harmful effect on the social and political life of the Ummah. What our Ummah is experiencing today, this unprecedented fragmentation, this failure to stand firm before its enemies, these successive defeats, and its inability to establish an Islamic unity that can bring together its scattered parts—all of this is among the evil consequences of reprehensible fanaticism, which tears the Ummah apart. And Allaah is the One whose help is sought.

More than one of the great scholars of Islaam has discussed the harms of fanaticism towards a madhhab and how, because of it, many people have turned away from the Quraan and Sunnah, considering themselves independent of them by relying on opinions instead. For this discussion, I have selected a passage from the words of Imam Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, and I shall then, if Allaah wills, follow it with the words of his teacher, the Shaikh of Islaam Ibn Taymiyyah, may Allaah have mercy on them both.

Imam Ibn al-Qayyim said in one of his books, “When people turned away from judging by the Book and the Sunnah and referring disputes back to them, and believed that they were not sufficient for them, turning instead to opinions, qiyās, personal preference, and the sayings of shaikhs, corruption entered their natural disposition/innate nature [fiṭrah], darkness entered their hearts and confusion their understanding, and their intellects became diminished. These things became widespread among them and prevailed over them, such that the young were raised on it and the elders grew old with it, no longer seeing it as something reprehensible.

An entirely different state emerged, where innovations replaced the Sunnah, one’s nafs replaced intellect, desires replaced guidance, misguidance replaced guidance, wrong replaced right, ignorance replaced knowledge, showing off replaced sincerity, falsehood replaced truth, lying replaced honesty, flattery replaced sincere advice, and oppression replaced justice. So power and dominance came to belong to these things, and the people doing this were the ones who rose to prominence, whereas before, it had belonged to their exact opposites.”

He then said, may Allaah have mercy on him, “If you see the State [dawlah] of these people approaching, you see it has become established and its armies mounted—then the belly of the earth, by Allaah, is better than its surface, the peaks of mountains are better than the plains, and mixing with wild beasts is safer than mixing with people.”

Then, advising those caught up in this, he said, “Buy yourself today, for the market is open, the means are available, and goods are cheap. A day will come upon that market and those goods when you will not be able to obtain a little or a lot, that will be the Day of mutual loss and gain [yawmut-Taghābun], “And ˹beware of˺ the Day the wrongdoer will bite his nails ˹in regret˺ and say, ‘Oh! I wish I had followed the Way along with the Messenger!’” [25:27]

He further added, “The one who acts without sincerity or by emulating [the Prophet ﷺ] is like a traveler who fills his pouch with sand, it weighs him down and does not benefit him.”

Then, describing the fanatical blind-followers, he said, “Most of what they have is mere talk, opinions, and guesswork. Knowledge lies beyond mere talk, as Hammād bin Zaid said, ‘I asked Ayyūb, ‘Is knowledge greater today or in the past?’ He replied, ‘Talk is greater today, but knowledge was greater in the past.’’ So this firmly grounded scholar distinguished between knowledge and talk. 

Books are extremely numerous, talk, debate, and intellectual exercises are abundant, yet true knowledge is not a part of most of it—[true] knowledge is what the Messenger brought from Allaah. Allaah, the Most High, said, ‘Now, whoever disputes with you ˹O Prophet˺ concerning Jesus after full knowledge has come to you,’ [3:61] and He said, ‘And if you were to follow their desires after ˹all˺ the knowledge that has come to you,’ [2:145] and He said in the Quraan, ‘He has sent it down with His knowledge,’ [4:166] meaning from His knowledge.”

The Imām continued his words, saying, “Then when people became distant from this knowledge, the situation devolved for many to the point where they took their inner thoughts, passing reflections, and opinions as knowledge. They wrote books about them, expending efforts on them, and wasted time on them.

They filled pages with ink and hearts with blackness.

Such that it reached the point where many of them explicitly declared that there is no knowledge in the Quraan and Sunnah, and that their evidences are merely verbal or linguistic and do not yield certainty or knowledge!

And the Devil screamed out this statement among them and announced it in their midst until those near and far heard it. And thus hearts were stripped of knowledge and faith, just as a snake sheds its skin, or a person takes off his garment.”

He went on to say, “One of the leaders of these people told me, ‘We only listen to ḥadīth for the sake of blessing. We do not derive knowledge from it, because others have already spared us this effort. Our reliance is on what they understood and decided.’ There is no doubt that anyone whose level of knowledge is like this is just as the poet said: 

‘They camped in Makkah among the tribes of Hāshim,
while I camped in Al-Baṭḥā in the furthest dwelling.’” 

[Trans. Note: namely, the Companions and whoever follows them etc., settled in the heart of Makkah, among the Banū Hāshim while the misguided went far away and settled in a place called Al-Baṭḥā, worlds apart.]

The Shaikh of Islaam, Ibn Taymiyyah, Allaah have mercy on him, said in describing these people, “They circled the doors of the Madhhabs and came away with the most worthless of objectives. Sufficient proof for you [to be able to recognise] that what they possess is not from Allaah are the contradictions, the differences, and how it all clashes among itself. The Most High said, ‘Do they not then reflect on the Quraan? Had it been from anyone other than Allaah, they would have certainly found in it many inconsistencies.’ [4:82] This shows that what is from Him, Exalted is He, does not contradict itself, and that whatever does differ and contradict itself is not from Him.

How can opinions, things imagined, and passing thoughts become a religion that is practiced and used to pass judgment on Allaah and His Messenger ﷺ—Glory be to You ˹O Lord˺! This is a heinous slander!

The knowledge that the Companions used to discuss among themselves was completely different from the sciences of these backward liars, as Al-Ḥākim narrated in the biography of Abu Abdullah Al-Bukhārī, ‘When the Companions of the Messenger of Allaah ﷺ gathered, they would only discuss the Book of their Lord and the Sunnah of their Prophet. There was no opinion [raʾy] or analogy [qiyās] between them.’” End of Ibn Taymiyyah’s words.

This does not mean rejecting analogy entirely, for things like causal analogy (Qiyāsul-ʿIllah) are indispensable, and the discussion on this is well-known in its proper place.

Tagged: Hadith Rejectors, quraniyoon