8-Belief and Islam - Hakikat Kitabevi

Ahl as-Sunna succeeding Salaf as-sâlihîn are called ‘Khalaf.’”
Al-Imâm al-Ghazâlî, al-Imâm ar-Râdî and al-Imâm al-Baidâwî,
who was loved and honoured above all by the ’ulamâ’ of tafsîr,
were all in the madhhab of Salaf as-sâlihîn. Groups of bid’a that
appeared in their time mixed ’ilm al-kalâm with philosophy. In
fact, they founded their îmân on philosophy. The book Al-milal
wa’n-nihal gives detailed information on the beliefs held by
those heretical groups. While defending the madhhab of Ahl as-
Sunna against those corrupt groups and rebutting their heretical
ideas, these three imâms gave extensive answers to their
philosophy. Giving these answers does not mean mixing
philosophy with the madhhab of Ahl as-Sunna. On the contrary,
they purged the knowledge of kalâm from the philosophical
thoughts interpolated into it. There is no philosophical thought
or philosophical method in al-Baidâwî’s work, or in the tafsîr of
Shaikh-zâda, the most valuable of its annotations. It is a very
nefarious calumny to say that these exalted imâms took to
philosophy. This stigma was first attached to the ’ulamâ’ of Ahl
as-Sunna by Ibn Taimiyya in his book Al-wâsita. Further, to
state that Ibn Taimiyya and his disciple Ibn al-Qayyim al-
Jawziyya tried to enrich the Salafiyya madhhab is to divulge a
very important crux where those who are on the right path and
those who have deviated into error differ from each other.
Before those two people there was not a madhhab called
“Salafiyya,” nor even the word ‘Salafiyya’; how could they be
said to have tried to enrich it? Before those two, there was only
one right madhhab, the madhhab of Salaf as-sâlihîn, which was
named Ahl as-Sunna wa ’l-Jamâ’a. Ibn Taimiyya tried to
distort this right madhhab and invented many bid’as. The
source of the books, words and heretical, corrupt thoughts of
today’s lâ-madhhabî people and religion reformers is only the
bid’as invented by Ibn Taimiyya. In order to decieve Muslims
and to convince the youth that their heretical path was the right
path, these heretics devised a horrible stratagem; they forged
the name “Salafiyya” from the term “Salaf as-sâlihîn” so that
they might justify Ibn Taimiyya’s bid’as and corrupt ideas and
drift the youth into his wake; they attached the stigmas of
philosophy and bid’a to Islamic ’ulamâ’, who are the successors
of Salaf as-sâlihîn, and blamed them for dissenting from their
invented name Salafiyya; they put forward Ibn Taimiyya as a
mujtahid, as a hero that resuscitated Salafiyya. Actually, the
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