Adherence to the Sunnah and the Commonality of Its Abandonment in Our Time
Imām Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī
A concise statement on the relevance of avoiding and warning against all types of religious innovation and clinging to the path of the Messenger (ﷺ).
Allāh’s Messenger (صلى الله عليه وسلم) said, “I counsel you to fear Allāh and to show obedience even if a slave becomes your leader. Verily those among you who live (long) will see great controversy, so you must adhere to my Sunnah and to the sunnah of the rightly-guided Caliphs—bite onto it with your molars. Beware of newly invented matters, for every invented matter is an innovation and every innovation is misguidance, and every misguidance is in the Hellfire.”[1]
This is among the important hadiths which encourage the Muslims to adhere to the Sunnah of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم), the righty-guided Caliphs, and those who tread their path. This ḥadīth also prohibits all forms of religious innovation, deeming them all to be misguidance, even if people perceive them to be good, as is authentically established from the saying of Ibn ʿUmar (رضي الله عنهما).[2] Moreover, the hadiths which unequivocally prohibit religious innovation are plentiful and well-known. Despite that, the majority of the Muslims today have turned away from them, without any distinction in that regard between the common folk and the knowledgeable, except for a few among them. In fact, many of them even perceive inquiry, examination and research into such matters to be from the most trivial of affairs. They regard distinguishing the Sunnah from innovation as something which causes fitnah (sowing of discord and dissension), splitting the ranks of the Muslims. They advise the people to completely abandon all such matters, counseling one another to completely avoid the discussion of any matter in which there is a difference of opinion, forgetting, or feigning forgetfulness, that among the matters of differing between the People of Sunnah and the People of Innovation, is the statement of tawḥīd (Lā Ilāha Illá Allāh). For they do not understand that this statement obligates worshipping Allāh alone, and that it is impermissible to direct any form of worship to other than Him, such as supplicating to the dead from amongst the righteous in times of difficulty and seeking their supposed aid:
وَهُمْ يَحْسَبُونَ أَنَّهُمْ يُحْسِنُونَ صُنْعًا ﴿١٠٤﴾
“While they think that they are acquiring good by their deeds!”
[Al-Kahf, 18:104][3]
Endnotes:
[1] Authentic: Collected by Abū Dāwūd: 4607 and al-Tirmidhī: 2676, and al-Albānī deemed it authentic in Ṣaḥīḥ Sunan Abī Dāwūd.
[2] Authentic: Collected by al-Marwazi in al-Sunnah: 83. Al-Albānī deemed the narration to be authentic here, and Shaykh ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-ʿAbbād said its chain of narration is authentic in al-Radd ʿAlá al-Būṭī wa al-Rāfiʿī: 49. Its wording is, “Every innovation is regarded to be a form of misguidance, even if people perceive it to be something good.”
[3] Silsilat al-Aḥādīth al-Ṣaḥīḥah 6: 527.
Translated by: Omar ibn Bilal
