The Shaykh’s clarification of the necessity of warning against false speech, whether its attribution to its author is correct or not.

The Shaykh : And as you know from us, from long ago, when we were there in the Levant, when we were studying Ibn Arabi’s negation of the divine, his acts of disbelief, and the figurative interpretation of those who admired him and followed his Sufism, whenever we drew attention to the disbelief and misguidance in his books, they would say: “This was inserted into the Shaykh’s work.” So we would say: “We are not currently engaged in investigating the attribution of these statements to the man, because the man has passed to the justice of Allah (Mighty and Majestic), so his reckoning is with Allah. But what concerns us are these words which, on the one hand, you say were inserted into his work, and on the other hand, you circulate day and night and educate yourselves with them. So what matters to us is to clarify that these words are open, explicit disbelief. Whether the attribution is correct or not, we have no relationship with its author, but our relationship is with this statement. This statement is either disbelief or misguidance. We say this a fortiori regarding the vulgar words contrary to the Shari'ah that are transmitted from some people of knowledge and virtue. It is sufficient for us to say that they are contrary to the Shari'ah. As for whether they are correctly attributed to so-and-so or not, that does not concern us, unless we are faced with the established fact that they are correctly attributed. In that case, we say: The attribution is correct, but the statement itself is not correct, and so on.”