They accuse you of not following the jurisprudential ijtihad of the four Imams; is this true?

The Shaykh : Here is a question. The questioner says: They accuse you of not following the statements of the four Imams (may Allah be pleased with them), or, if the expression is correct, their jurisprudential ijtihad; meaning, they intend that we do not follow their jurisprudential ijtihad. I ask Allah (Glorified and Exalted is He) to guide us, and Allah is the helper. O Allah...
I say: As for those who accuse us of this accusation, my dealing with them is as the poet said:
"Another has committed the sin, and I am the one punished for it among you *** So I am like the finger of the one who regrets"
Another has committed the sin; it is another who does not follow the ijtihad of the Imams. As for us, we follow the ijtihad of all of them; because the student of knowledge has no way to seek knowledge except through one of two paths: either he follows only one Imam from the four Imams, and this is, of course, shortening the speech and cutting off stages that must be explained; because students of knowledge today cannot even take from one Imam, but only through intermediaries. But I say: The student of knowledge today has no way to acquire knowledge except through one of two paths: either he follows one Imam, and the second path is that he follows all the Imams.
The first path is the method of the madhhab followers, the rigid imitators; who first: never pay attention to what Allah said or what the Messenger of Allah said, and second: do not pay attention to taking from the other Imams to whose madhhab they do not belong in their seeking of knowledge. So the path of seeking knowledge is either by imitating a specific madhhab, or by following the Imams without fanaticism for one over the others; so what is the method of the people today who accuse us of not following the ijtihad of the Imams? And what is our method?
If you know that our method is taking from every Imam, and not only the four Imams; then Allah (Mighty and Majestic) has favored the Ummah of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) with Imams like the four Imams by the dozens, indeed by the hundreds, indeed by the thousands. So those who follow the method of adhering to the Book and the Sunnah are those who follow the ijtihad of the Imams, while those who imitate a specific madhhab, these do not benefit from the other Imams and do not follow their ijtihad. So it has become clear that, as I told you earlier: "Another has committed the sin, and I am the one punished for it among you"; it is another who does not follow the ijtihad of the Imams, not me. I follow the ijtihad of all the Imams without distinguishing between one and another of them.
Then it is necessary here to point out that this method we follow, of not being fanatical for one Imam over another, is the method that the four Imams themselves and others have charted and established for the Muslims; because that is what the Book and the Sunnah require: that we do not imitate a specific person; because the specific person is subject to error and correctness. And when we say: error, we do not mean sneering, hinting, or criticism as those people accuse us of, but we mean that he—namely, the mujtahid from among these mujtahids—either receives two rewards, or receives one reward. If he receives one reward, that equals for us that he erred, and error equals for us that he received one reward. Among the things people have confused in their concepts and deviated from the correct understanding of the Book and the Sunnah is that if a Muslim says regarding a scholar that he erred, it is considered a criticism of the one about whom it was said that he erred, and this is ignorance. The Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) said regarding Abu Bakr in a matter where he erred; did the Messenger criticize his companion in the cave? Far from it! Rather, he said regarding some of his companions when they issued a fatwa and erred in it: "So-and-so lied," and "lied" in the language we almost forget the meaning of—this word—means: erred. So if we say today "So-and-so lied," oh, how delicate!! And we do not say it, because the people do not understand their language, but we cannot say anything other than "he erred," and "he erred" equals "he received one reward."
The summary—and the research in this is long—is: We respect all the Imams and follow their ijtihad, and not the ijtihad of just one of them. And on the contrary; every madhhab follower who says: "We respect the Imams and honor them" is a hypocrite who says what he does not believe. In the books of the Hanafi madhhab specifically, Ibn 'Abidin says: "If we are asked about our madhhab, we say: Our madhhab is correct, admitting the possibility of error. And if we are asked about the madhhab of others, we say: It is all error." The madhhab of others.
I am a Hanafi; my madhhab is all correct, admitting the possibility of error, and the madhhab of anyone other than Abu Hanifa—the madhhab of Malik, al-Shafi'i, Ahmad, al-Thawri, 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Mahdi, and others—all of these, their madhhab is error, admitting the possibility of correctness. This is their statement, written and printed. As for us, if we say: So-and-so erred in this issue, and we mean he received one reward, oh, the jealousy of Allah!! As for what is printed in the books, all the madhahib are error except our madhhab, no problem! And this is a belief they must hold.
In summary: "She threw her disease at me and slipped away." We follow the Imams; it is not the imitators who follow, ever. And their respect for the Imams, if they want to be sincere, they must prove to us in which issue the Hanafi followed al-Shafi'i? In which issue did he follow Imam Malik? And in which issue did he follow Imam Ahmad, so that we believe that they respect the Imams? As for one of them continuing to live without deviating a hair's breadth from his madhhab, and not acknowledging the value of a hair's breadth in the other madhahib as being correct; then when he says that he respects the Imams, he needs something to support and verify him.
As for us, our reality testifies that we respect all the Imams. I, for example... in my country, only the Hanafi madhhab is known, and all of Islam there is the Hanafi madhhab. And our Lord (Mighty and Majestic) favored us and inspired our father to migrate with us to learn the Arabic language and learn Islam from its two pure sources, the Book and the Sunnah. We have known the Imams and known their virtue and knowledge, and so on. So I am a Hanafi; I learned the Hanafi fiqh that raising the hands at ruku' and rising from it is disliked, and it was said: it is forbidden, and it was said: the prayer is invalid if you raise your hands at ruku' and rising from it, and this is recorded in the books and they are printed. When the Sunnah regarding raising the hands became clear to me, I found that Imam al-Shafi'i, Imam Ahmad, and Imam Malik—also—took it either from the majority like Malik, al-Shafi'i, and Ahmad, or sometimes from al-Shafi'i without Malik, and sometimes from Malik without al-Shafi'i, and sometimes from Ahmad without this and that; this is our respect for the Imams. But they, sometimes with bad intent, and sometimes with misunderstanding—and the intent may be good—assume that if we say the statement that raising the hands in prayer is disliked is an error, we have criticized Imam Abu Hanifa. No, we have not criticized Imam Abu Hanifa; so what do you say? You say: Our madhhab is all correct, admitting the possibility of error; so you have criticized all the Imams and all their statements, no problem? Like this; meaning, they combine contradictions in their minds.
We ask Allah (Mighty and Majestic) to guide us and them to respect the Imams and follow them according to their own methodology, not according to the imitators' blind imitation.