The Ruling on the People of the Interval, and the Refutation of the Contemporary Ghazali in His Rejection of the Hadith: (My father and your father are in the Fire).

The Shaykh : Now we return: Consider the one who was before the mission of the Messenger (peace be upon him), such as the two parents mentioned in this hadith, and like that father whose question was the cause for the coming of this hadith when he turned to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) with his saying: meaning: his father who died before the mission of the Messenger (may Allah's prayers and peace be upon him). His answer (peace be upon him) was: to the end of the hadith. So, this one who died before the mission of the Messenger (peace be upon him), do you think he falls under the generality of the previous Quranic text: ? Let a guesser guess and a supposer suppose that this hadith cannot be authentic, because this father about whom the son asked his Prophet (peace be upon him) died before the mission. So, we apply to him the saying of Allah (Mighty and Majestic): Here, the Muslim must take a stance from two positions, with no third: either he says—and this is what the contemporary Ghazali did when he rejected this hadith with the suspicion of relying on the previous verse: The meaning of his deviated logic from the Sunnah is: This man did not receive the call; the call of the Messenger did not reach him. So it follows that our Lord does not punish him. How can our Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) say about him: ? The problem is that this person judged a matter of the unseen with his intellect, and the human intellect cannot know that unseen matter unless it is extended by revelation from the sky. That is, this father about whom the Messenger (peace be upon him) informed that he is in the Fire, the human intellect cannot say: The call did not reach him. And based on that, he says: The saying of the Exalted: It is not correct to hold this disbeliever, about whom the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) ruled that he is in the Fire, accountable. What is built on a defective foundation is defective. I said: No one can say to this father that he died before the message reached him. If that were the case, the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) would not have ruled that he is in the Fire.
Here the question arises: Is the Messenger of Allah more knowledgeable about the father of this questioner than one who came after fourteen centuries and says: This is from the People of the Interval; the message did not reach him. And based on that, he says: This hadith does not apply and does not align with the Noble Quran, and from that is this noble verse.
Our answer: The verse, without doubt or doubt, is from the foundations of the Shari'ah: And the Sunnah came to confirm the meaning of this noble verse, which is his saying (peace be upon him), as in *Sahih Muslim* also, that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) said: So, the argument stands against the one who received the call. And if we assume a person who did not receive the call, whether before the call of the Messenger (peace be upon him) or even in this time, if we assume a person who did not receive the call, he is not punished, by the evidence of the previous verse: So, the disagreement is not in the verse or its indication, but rather the disagreement is that a person named Zayd came, and the authentic hadith says: He is in the Fire. So we say, from ourselves or from our desires: He is not in the Fire. Why?! Because he died before the mission of the Messenger (peace be upon him). The answer is that we know that before the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) there were prophets, indeed messengers, and in the Arabian Peninsula specifically, there was the call of our father Ibrahim al-Khalil (may Allah's prayers and peace be upon him) and his son Ismail. In the Noble Quran, as you all know: to the end of the verse. So, this House, which is still, praise be to Allah, filled and visited by Muslim pilgrims from the ends of the earth to the House of Allah the Sacred, the call of Ibrahim al-Khalil was established and inherited by the Arabs themselves. But without doubt, what entered into their oneness of Allah (tawhid) has no basis, and it is shirk (associating partners with Allah) itself. Yet, with that, there were individuals from the people of tawhid who remained on their tawhid in the jahiliyyah (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance) that was before the mission of the Messenger (peace be upon him). So, if one of these monotheists died, can we say: The call did not reach him? Or if someone else died, can we say the call reached them or did not reach them? Why? Because the matter is unseen, so the reference for that is to the one whom Allah (Mighty and Majestic) chose with His messages, as He (Blessed and Exalted is He) said: And our Messenger, our Lord (Mighty and Majestic) chose him and informed him of many of the unseen matters, as indicated by many scientific and historical discoveries and the like. So, when a hadith comes to say about a specific person that he is in the Fire, why do we strike this hadith with the verse, when we do not have the details of the individuals who existed after Ibrahim (peace be upon him), whether they died on shirk or died on tawhid? We say a general word: "Everyone who died between Ibrahim and Ismail (may Allah's prayers and peace be upon them) and the call of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him and his family), everyone who died between these two calls, is either one who received the call and the argument stood against him, so he is not from the People of the Interval, or one who did not receive the call, so he is from the People of the Interval and has a special treatment on the Day of Resurrection". I do not want to now turn to explaining it, so that I remain in what we are currently addressing.