The Shaykh’s explanation regarding charlatans whom the common people consider to be awliya (close friends of Allah).

The Shaykh : ... But what can you say when there are many, and very many, stories of a person drinking intoxicants, and when he is rebuked, he says, "This is from the wine of Paradise; this is nothing like your wine." Another sells hashish, and when he is rebuked, he says, "You think I am selling narcotic hashish? I am selling the opposite of narcotic hashish, and that if a person buys this hashish from me, he will quit his habit of using narcotic hashish." And by this, they have disabled reason and disabled the Shari'ah. And sufficient for you in that is their saying that there is a Shari'ah and there is a reality, and the reality contradicts the Shari'ah. And they have words that are dangerous and very dangerous. And perhaps it is good that I mention to you a story that happened to me personally. I went out as usual on my way to our brothers in Aleppo, and we took a house on the road where we stayed for a night, in a village about sixty kilometers from Damascus called Deir 'Atiyyah. And we were sitting and keeping vigil in it. Instead of knocking on the door, the house is on the main road, on the lower floor, instead of knocking on the door, he knocked on the window. So the owner of the house came out to look at this strange visitor who was knocking on the window instead of the door. We were surprised by the owner of the house shouting in welcome to the visitor, "Welcome, so-and-so." We, of course, were eager to see this noble guest whom the owner of the house was honoring with such great honor. This supposed guest entered, and I was surprised by him as he was surprised by me. I mean the man was a hashish user, one who abandons the prayer, does not fast in Ramadan, and smokes in Ramadan. And he had his back leaning against a corner of the mosque, outside the mosque, and his eyes were wide open and yellow from the effect of the hashish on them. So I was surprised by him, on the one hand, because this owner of the house, whom we were guests of, was welcoming a hashish user, an open sinner, a lewd person, if not a disbeliever. He was surprised by me because he is our neighbor; my shop was there next to this mosque. So whenever I went out for prayer, and he was smoking hashish, smoking smoke that naturally contains hashish, when he saw me, he sat far away from me, and he began to pretend that he was seized, meaning attracted, that the state had taken him. So he began to bow and prostrate like this and say words that they say about us in the Levant, words that are covered up, meaning words in the Arabic language, meaning an incomplete sentence, like "what are we going to do, hashish, eggs, eggplant," meaning an incomplete sentence, ... At that time, I knew that the owner of the house believed that this man was one of the great awliya. I improvised a speech, opening it with the noble verse .