The Shaykh’s remarks on al-Ghazali, who abandons acting upon the hadiths.

The Shaykh : You have before you now an example found in the book of this man named Muhammad al-Ghazali, or simply al-Ghazali. This is the old Muhammad al-Ghazali, with a shaddah on the ghayn. As for the modern al-Ghazali, I do not know if it is with a shaddah or a sukun. In any case, in his book he now dismisses the hadiths of al-Bukhari and Muslim with numerous narrations, dismissing them due to his narrow-mindedness and poor thinking. For example, he comes to the hadith: He builds for me palaces and mansions. This is in his latest book, *Following the Sunnah* or what?

The questioner : *The Prophetic Sunnah Between the People of Jurisprudence and the Defenders of Hadith*.

The Shaykh : Yes, he asks you, is this reasonable? The Angel of Death comes to Musa, the one who spoke to Allah, and says to him, "Answer your Lord." He fears death and goes to strike the Angel of Death, knocking out his eye. The Angel of Death returns to his Lord and says, "O my Lord, You sent me to a man who does not love death." He says, "Go back to him and tell him to place his hand on the skin of a bull."

The questioner : ... to place his hand?

The Shaykh : Yes, let him place his hand on the skin of a bull, and for every hair under his hand, he will have a year of life. So the Angel of Death came and said to him, "This is the message Allah commanded me to deliver." Musa said to him, "And what comes after that?" He said, "Death." He said, "Then, right now." He said, peace be upon him: . Al-Ghazali says in the modern era that this hadith is false, and even if, my brother, al-Bukhari and Muslim narrated it. This is a statement a scholar would not make. If the issue were raised by, for example, Al-Albani or Ibn Baz, it would be easy. But this was narrated by al-Bukhari and Muslim, and the Ummah has reached consensus on it. Do you see, the Ummah has reached consensus on it? This is not a verification from today; it has been verified for hundreds of years, and the Ummah accepted it. So when he dismisses it, he strikes this hadith in the chest and says, "Even if al-Bukhari and Muslim narrated it." This does not mean he does not respect the knowledge of al-Bukhari and Muslim, their precision, and the strength of the methodologies they established for their authentic collections. No, he does not respect the consensus of the Ummah. Meanwhile, you find this man declaring takfir against some individuals from the people of the Sunnah because they contradict the well-known jurists of today, or at least some of them, or rather most of them, because they follow the Sunnah. He says these people do not know anything of jurisprudence, contradicting the majority of scholars, and then he contradicts all the scholars, riding on his own head and his ignorance. He says this hadith cannot be authentic. ... This hadith, first of all, appears to the researcher to be truly a very easy matter, and it is in an authentic narration in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad: . What does this al-Ghazali know? He is ignorant. Unfortunately, he does not know of hadith anything but its name, and he picks up hadiths from any book that comes along, not knowing the authentic from the weak. And even if he pretends to evaluate, or rather assess, the science of hadith, he gives no weight to the science of hadith, nor to those who work in it. So he does not know that there is a narration in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad that eliminates the doubt from its root, because if any person, and he is the first of them, were to come to him as a human being like in his story and say to him, "I want to take your soul, take your soul," he would do what Musa did and more, because this is not the action of a human being. And so when he came with a message from Allah, and Musa, peace be upon him, was reassured that this was not an ordinary human being, but rather an angel sent by Allah, he said that word which indicates the opposite of what the Angel of Death assumed, that he was not desirous of life. He struck him because he had not realized it was the Angel of Death. So he said to him, after these hundreds of years, by the number of hairs under my hand, what comes after that? He said, "After that, death is inevitable."
The Shaykh: Death was written for the creation, so how many *** did he gather and how many dynasties did he destroy?
The Shaykh: He said to him, "Then, right now," and he took his soul. So this hadith has no problem, even from a single look at the collection of narrations of the hadith, including this narration, that the Angel of Death came in the form of a human being. So we advise our Muslim brothers in general, and the people of the Sunnah in particular, not to rush to deny what they do not know, but rather to be certain and to be patient in denying hadiths; for above every knowledgeable one is the All-Knowing.