The Shaykh's advice to the young who have taken up authorship or editing before they are yet mature.

The Shaykh : So is it the case that all these young people, whose offices and bookstores are now filled with hundreds of books and treatises, are people who are neither in the caravan nor in the army in this knowledge, and who have left no mark in their smaller community nor in the larger one? All that happened is that some ideas came to their minds, so they devoted themselves to some books, taking from them and writing their own opinions and ideas, and then publishing them for people, either by authoring something themselves or by commenting on the work of others, and thus becoming part of the group who print their names under the title "edited by so-and-so." This is inserting oneself into the lesser category about which Allah the Exalted said: Therefore, I advise our young brothers to be cautious about presenting themselves in the ranks of scholars, researchers, and editors, because they are still at the beginning of the path. Just recently, one of them presented me with a printed treatise, and on the back cover it said "Second Edition." What is this book? It says in the introduction: "I have selected these hadiths from al-Jami' al-Saghir by al-Suyuti, and from the hadiths of the Household of the Prophet." Al-Suyuti's book, al-Jami' al-Saghir, contains, as many of you know, fabricated hadiths, let alone weak ones. So what did this man do? He took al-Jami' al-Saghir—and if only he had taken Sahih al-Jami' al-Saghir!—he took al-Jami' al-Saghir and selected from it about three hundred hadiths, then added another fifty, claiming they were from the hadiths of the Household of the Prophet, which also contain fabricated ones, let alone weak ones. What did this man do? Nothing, but he wanted to appear before people as an author. In al-Jami' al-Saghir there are seven thousand authentic hadiths and about the same number of weak ones. So imagine if every person with an idea comes and takes from al-Jami' al-Saghir to write a treatise of three hundred hadiths, or even a thousand. If we suppose that people wrote treatises of a thousand hadiths from al-Jami' al-Saghir, there would be fifteen authors, and their works would contain nothing but a repetition of the hadiths found in al-Jami' al-Saghir. Is this a service to knowledge? And is the one who performed this service among the people of knowledge? The answer is: No. Now, arrogance has taken hold of many students of knowledge, let alone those who are known as callers to Islam. These people have been afflicted with arrogance and knowledge, while they are far from it. The example of the Egyptian Shaykh al-Ghazali is not far from you. He claimed what he had no knowledge of, and he weakened many hadiths in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim because they contradicted his culture. If only it had been an Islamic culture! It was a foreign, Western culture. So the point is that purification and education are necessary. We are at the beginning of the path of purification, but we have not yet taken a single step on the path of education. We must observe ourselves, strive against them, and educate them upon the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him), and we must be far from following desires. For he (peace and blessings be upon him) said: Please, go ahead.