Discussion of the hadith: (And my Ummah will split into seventy-three sects), and the cause of their misguidance.

The Shaykh : Recently, I believe the famous hadith is his saying (peace and blessings be upon him): ... We find that the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) did not limit himself to the command to follow his Sunnah only, but he added to this command his saying: . The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) in this hadith seems to have derived this meaning from the Noble Qur'an. The Qur'an says: , the Messenger says: . What is the point, whether in the verse: or in the hadith: ? Why did not our Lord in the verse, as mentioned before, limit Himself to saying: "And whoever opposes the Messenger after the clear proof has come to him, We will turn him to what he has turned to"? And why did not the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) limit himself to saying: and not mention the Sunnah of the Rightly Guided Caliphs?
And for the sake of what we are currently addressing, which is establishing the methodology that Muslims in every country, in every time and place, must follow so that they remain protected from deviation from the Book and the Sunnah together; because these sects, despite their number being seventy-three, are all perishing, and it is ruled that they are all from the people of the Fire except for one sect. Is there among any of these sects that we have known up to today, excluding the Quranists who appeared in the present age as one of the trials by which Muslims are tested, is there among these sects one who said what these Quranists claim: "Islam is only the Qur'an"? There is absolutely none among them. Every group, every sect among them says: We are upon the Book and the Sunnah.
Before this group of Quranists, a group occurred before them about a century ago. This group's name is more famous in the Islamic world than the Quranists; because these Quranists are of recent origin, whereas the group I want to use as an example now is "the Qadiani group." The Qadianis claim to belong to Islam, but they believe in beliefs that are against Islam and contrary to Islam. One of the clearest of these beliefs that contradict Muslims is their explicit statement that prophethood and heavenly revelation did not cease, and that there are prophets who come after the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) in large numbers, and that one of these prophets, according to their claim, came in "Qadian" in the lands of India, and he is called "Mirza Ghulam Ahmad al-Qadiani" ... in other countries. So they used the Qur'an as evidence and also used the Sunnah as evidence, and all the Islamic sects are like this; there is no one among them who says: Islam is rational, Islam is only the Qur'an, but rather Islam is the Qur'an and the Sunnah. All the sects, however deeply rooted in misguidance they may be, claim that Islam is the Qur'an and the Sunnah, even the Khawarij.
So what is the cause of the misguidance of these groups and all these sects, as long as they all agree on believing in the Book and the Sunnah? Here is the crux of this speech. The cause is that every group among them acts arrogantly and interprets the texts of the Qur'an and the Sunnah according to their desires. From here, misguidance entered these sects. And the fundamental cause of this is that they did not believe, or at least did not act in accordance with, the previous verse: . There is no doubt that this verse contains a warning against following other than the path of the believers, and it contains, by implication, the command to follow the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) and not to oppose him, which he made explicit at the beginning of the verse by saying: ; meaning: whoever opposes the Messenger. Likewise, he affirmed following the path of the believers when he prohibited opposing them, so he added to his saying: .
So there are two prohibitions in the verse, corresponding to two commands; the first prohibition is not opposing the Messenger, the second prohibition is not opposing the path of the believers, excuse me, opposing the path of the believers, this is the second prohibition, and the first prohibition is opposing the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him); he prohibited that. Corresponding to the two prohibitions is the command to follow the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) and the command to follow the path of the believers. So misguidance entered even with these sects that agreed on following, or on the fact that the Qur'an and the Sunnah are the two sources, the sources of Islam in legislation, but they did not follow the path of the believers, so they strayed from the straight path.
So the lesson from this verse is that Allah (Mighty and Majestic) commands Muslims in every time and place not to deviate from the path of the believers who were before them in interpreting the verses and in interpreting the hadiths; so that the claimant to following the Book and the Sunnah does not mean that he claims to be the intended meaning of the Book and the Sunnah, and this is a foreign meaning in Islam. The evidence for this is that the Muslims who were before this interpreter did not interpret the text that he interpreted in the same way he did, but rather they interpreted it with another interpretation. So the Muslims who followed a path in interpreting the texts of the Book and the Sunnah, this path is what we are commanded to follow so that we do not take to the right and left because of our own interpretation of texts in a way that contradicts what the Muslims before us were upon.