What is your opinion on the tapes of Dr. Tariq Suwaidan, and do you advise listening to them?

The questioner : Your Eminence the Shaykh! As the questioner mentions, this is an important question, and I hope for an answer. What is your opinion on the tapes of Dr. Tariq Suwaidan? And do you advise listening to them?

The Shaykh : I advise listening to beneficial tapes from whoever they are, and I warn against listening to non-beneficial tapes from whoever they are. The understanding, sensible person knows what is not beneficial and what is beneficial. So which tapes?
They publish the matters of ijtihad (independent legal reasoning) that occurred among the Companions, which led to some of them fighting each other, either by mistake or intentionally, while they were exercising ijtihad. If so, these tapes are not permissible to listen to. It is not permissible to listen to them. Because they will inevitably affect the heart, inclining one toward these or those. And as long as a person is in well-being, praise be to Allah.
If someone says, "I want to understand and know," we say, praise be to Allah, the books are available. The books are available; go back to them yourself. But as for publishing what happened among the Companions, this is absolutely not permissible, and listening to it is not permissible. It was the belief of the people of the Sunnah and the community that they remain silent about what occurred among the Companions. They entrust their matter to Allah the Exalted and say that whatever error came from them, they were exercising ijtihad; either they were correct, in which case they have two rewards, or they were wrong, in which case they have one reward. And if it is established that there was a confirmed error without ta'wil (figurative interpretation), their great good deeds swallow up their bad deeds.
What indicates that bad deeds are swallowed up by good deeds is what happened to Hatib ibn Abi Balta'ah when he wrote to Quraysh, informing them that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) intended to campaign against them. So Allah revealed this to His Prophet. He had sent it with a woman, and the woman was caught and brought in, and there was the letter from Hatib informing them that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) intended to campaign against them. If he was a spy for whom? Strange, my people, for disbelieving Quraysh. So the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) called him and said, "What is this, O Hatib?" He excused himself with an excuse that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) accepted. Then 'Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) asked permission to strike his neck because he spied on the Muslims. The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said to him, "Indeed " So look at how this great error was subsumed under this great good deed and swallowed up by it?
If this is the ruling on what happened among the Companions—that they were either exercising ijtihad, and the one exercising ijtihad is either wrong or correct; if he is wrong, he has one reward, and if he is correct, he has two rewards; or that they were not wrong but intentional, but they have many good deeds from jihad with the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him), carrying the Islamic Shari'ah to those after them, and other great good deeds in which their bad deeds are swallowed up—then what about us publishing the bad deeds now? Does this not lead to loving one person over another, or one person over another? Yes, by Allah, this happens. So it is not permissible to publish such tapes or listen to them. This is the criterion. Whether it is from so-and-so or so-and-so, likewise.
We must be extremely cautious not to listen to the words of one who is not a specialist in what he is saying. For example, if a jurist came to us and started talking about history, we would not trust him completely. Why? Because it is not his specialty.
And we trust the historian who is lower than him in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), because history is his specialty. So what if the one speaking in these tapes has no specialty in the religious sciences, but his specialty is in physics or chemistry or something similar? He would be like a night woodcutter. Do you know the night woodcutter? As you know, he does not put down his wood. The night woodcutter, when you hear about him, takes wood from the ground, and there may be a snake in it, and he does not know. So the night woodcutter is the one who does not distinguish between the beneficial and the harmful. This is the criterion. So everyone who does not distinguish between the harmful and the beneficial is called a night woodcutter.