Discussion of the issue of dividing religious innovations into good and bad.

The Shaykh : So we say at that point: Who are the true jurists who claim that there is scholarly disagreement on the issue of innovation, and who said that innovation in religion is divided into good innovation and bad innovation? As a rule, it is one thing, and the other is: we demand that they provide some examples of what those imams considered good and innovated, whom they claim to adhere to. If we were to ask the scholars of taqlid (following a scholar without knowing his evidence) today, "Bring us texts of good innovations," they would fill books and volumes enumerating them; they are numerous and very numerous. So bring us just ten innovations from an imam of the Muslim imams to whom you belong, and say, "This is a good innovation and this is a good innovation," with no evidence for it in the Book or the Sunnah. Here is a detail we have mentioned repeatedly: not everything that occurs, merely by its occurrence and happening after the Messenger, is a bid'ah (religious innovation). Rather, this is conditional on there being no evidence for it in the Book or the Sunnah. From this, the later scholars err when they proceed to divide bid'ah into five categories, saying: "Obligatory bid'ah," with the example of collecting the Qur'an. May Allah protect us! Collecting the Qur'an is a bid'ah? Why do they say this? Because the collection occurred after the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him). So the formal collection in a specific manner occurred after the Messenger, just as if we said that printing now; printing did not exist in the time of the Messenger, so we do not call it a bid'ah. This has a specific ruling and a specific chapter in the principles of jurisprudence, which is the chapter of mursal masalih (unrestricted public benefits).
They say that collecting the Qur'an is a bid'ah, and they say that 'Umar ibn al-Khattab gathering the Companions for tarawih is a bid'ah. And they might say—and I say this with caution—that 'Umar ibn al-Khattab expelling the Jews from Khaybar is a bid'ah; whereas these things have explicit texts. We have spoken about tarawih repeatedly and again and again. The Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) established tarawih by his action and encouraged it by his word. He said that the one who prays the night prayer in Ramadan with the imam and the Fajr prayer with the imam is as if he stood the whole night. And yet it is said that gathering people for tarawih is a bid'ah! This is one of two things: either they are ignorant of these sunnahs and call them by a name other than their own, and this is not far from those who are distant from understanding the Book and the Sunnah; or they—and this is the best of the two assumptions about them—use the term figuratively, as happened with some of the Salaf. 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, for example, called tarawih a bid'ah when he said, "What a good bid'ah this is," and he did not mean the bid'ah that the later scholars defined as innovation in religion; which is inventing a worship without a precedent from his action (peace and blessings be upon him) or his word.