Al-Albānī: Responses, Accusations and Misconceptions — Introduction

Al-Albānī is too well known to need an introduction. It is enough to say here that the two imams of this age, our shaykhs Ibn Bāz and Ibn ʿUthaymīn, bore witness to his eminence, and that he is an imam and a reviver (mujaddid). As for his knowledge of hadith, both those who disagreed with him and those who agreed with him testified that he was an imam in it; we have not seen anyone in this age who rivals him in this field, despite the great number of those who opposed him and attacked him. His differing with others in grading certain hadiths as authentic or weak remains within the kind of disagreement that is permissible for those well grounded in this science.

There is a group who claim to follow the method of the early scholars (al-mutaqaddimūn) in authenticating and weakening hadith, and who claim that they accept nothing of what he said in this science. Despite their falsehood and self-contradiction, we have examined what they said about some hadiths and found countless blunders. I know of none of them who has written an independent work on authentication and weakening by which they could prove the soundness of their method — and how far they are from that! We have a separate study refuting this group.

Imam al-Albānī became one of the most prominent scholarly authorities of the twentieth century. Yet despite his immense efforts in championing the Sunnah and purifying creed, he faced a violent storm of accusations that struck at the very core of his belief, describing him at times with “irjāʾ” and at other times with agreement with the “Jahmiyyah”. These accusations were not mere passing criticism; they turned into doctoral dissertations, published books and institutional fatwas, which made them a phenomenon deserving careful study.

The targeting of Shaykh al-Albānī did not come from nowhere. It resulted from a number of bold scholarly positions in which he opposed what prevailed in the “Ṣaḥwah” and “activist” discourse of that time, in addition to a linguistic precision in his use of terms that some considered foreign or misleading.

There is no doubt that our shaykh, in his written works, was meticulous and exact, to the extent that you will hardly find even printing errors in what he wrote, despite the great number of his books. However, the Shaykh chose for himself a method of calling to Allah that we have not found with anyone else, and it bore the greatest fruit: the method of question and answer, until it spread among the people and his recorded tapes exceeded five thousand. As is established among the people of knowledge, recorded speech is often not carefully worded, either because the mind is occupied with something else — he would speak while eating, while walking and while driving, and I saw this with my own eyes — or because the answer was given to a particular person or for a particular situation, and so on. This is like what Ibn ʿAbbās did with the man who came asking: “Is there repentance for a killer?” He answered him in the negative, even though killing, like the other major sins, can be repented from. For this reason, when we answer some difficulties in the Shaykh’s words by saying, “The Shaykh meant such-and-such,” or, “He has words in another place that detail and explain this passage,” his opponents do not accept it, as though he had said it in one of his written works. They do not distinguish between the setting that requires precision and detail, such as a written work, and the setting in which leniency is shown and such precision is not required, as we indicated above.

The Shaykh — may Allah forgive him; and we say this in fairness, for we learned from him to be partisan to the Book and the Sunnah rather than to individuals, however high their rank — over those long years and those recordings exceeding ten thousand hours in length, let slip statements that are problematic, some of which are rightly criticised, especially regarding faith (īmān) and disbelief (kufr). His opponents exploited those words because of his well-known fatwa on the issue of ruling by other than what Allah has revealed, a fatwa which the two imams of the age, Ibn Bāz and Ibn ʿUthaymīn, and other scholars, praised and endorsed. Yet that did not intercede for him with a faction of the Khawārij, who took his words in the worst possible sense and incited the scholars against him, cutting out of his words whatever supported their accusation of irjāʾ.

After that, I heard him repeat the saying of Imam ʿAbdullāh ibn al-Mubārak: “The Murjiʾah do not accept me.” Shaybān ibn Farrūkh had tested him, saying: “What do you say about one who commits fornication and drinks wine — is he a believer?” Ibn al-Mubārak answered: “I do not expel him from faith.” Shaybān said: “In your old age you have become a Murjiʾ?!” Ibn al-Mubārak replied: “The Murjiʾah do not accept me. I say that faith increases, and the Murjiʾah do not say that.”

If only the Shaykh’s opponents had confined themselves to criticising those problematic expressions without attacking his school and his creed. They knew that he does not exclude action from faith, and that he states clearly, as the Salaf said, that “faith is speech and action,” and that it is “speech with the tongue, belief in the heart and action with the limbs.” He has refutations of the Murjiʾah for excluding action from faith; indeed, he states plainly that the disagreement with the Murjiʾah of the jurists (Murjiʾat al-fuqahāʾ) is a real disagreement and not merely a verbal one. He also says that “faith increases and decreases until nothing of it remains.” Whoever says this has left irjāʾ entirely, from its beginning to its end, as the people of knowledge, early and later, have stated.

He also has statements on disbelief in which he declares that the legally responsible person (mukallaf) is judged to be a disbeliever without regard to his belief. As for excuse on account of ignorance (al-ʿudhr bil-jahl), his disagreement with most contemporary scholars concerns whether the proof has reached the specific individual — not whether the terms disbelief or polytheism may be applied to one who has committed one of the nullifiers of tawḥīd, as is the position of the Murjiʾah. That is why some of them reviled him on the issue of the one who reviles (Allah) and accused him of Jahmism, whereas the Shaykh’s words concerned an impediment (to declaring the individual a disbeliever), not that reviling Allah — and we seek refuge in Allah — is not disbelief.

I have seen some well-known shaykhs warning against the Shaykh and accusing him of irjāʾ, yet when asked about Abū Ḥanīfah and that some accuse him of irjāʾ, they become angry and warn against anyone who warns against the way of Abū Ḥanīfah — even though most of what the Salaf said in censure of the Murjiʾah was directed at Abū Ḥanīfah and his followers, and al-Bukhārī devoted chapters to refuting him even in matters of jurisprudence. In a previous issue we explained the correct position regarding Imam Abū Ḥanīfah, which the fair-minded among the people of knowledge accept, and we have explained the matter of the Murjiʾah of the jurists in the book Al-Murjiʾah wa al-Sayf.

But what harmed the Shaykh most was that some students of knowledge affiliated themselves with him, delved into issues greater than themselves and wrote about them, until they went so far as to establish the doctrine of the Murjiʾah and that “faith decreases until only an atom of it remains.” Because of their closeness to the Shaykh — even though the Shaykh did not read most of those works of theirs — and their claim that the doctrine they spread was the Shaykh’s doctrine, the matter became confused for many of the people of knowledge, who issued fatwas concerning them and thought that this doctrine was the Shaykh’s. The Shaykh was not free to clarify the matter, to refute or to explain, even though his tapes are full of what refutes this corrupt doctrine, as will be explained.

However, at the end of his life he was shown al-Ḥawālī’s book Ẓāhirat al-Irjāʾ (The Phenomenon of Irjāʾ) — al-Ḥawālī being the first to attach the accusation of irjāʾ to Shaykh al-Albānī — and the Shaykh wrote some comments on it, which were collected in the book Al-Durar al-Mutalaliʾah. Among them is his comment on al-Ḥawālī’s words: “It is astonishing that someone who attributes himself to the Sunnah and hadith then agrees with them in this view, so that whatever acts of disbelief a person does…” — meaning al-Albānī. Al-Albānī commented: “This generalisation is questionable; mockery, for example, is an action.” This is an explicit declaration that disbelief can occur through action, in reply to the one who accused him of restricting disbelief to belief.

And commenting on al-Ḥawālī’s insinuation that he had agreed with the Murjiʾah in saying “action is a condition for the completeness of faith,” al-Albānī said: “I do not think the author believes that whoever abandons anything that was obligated upon him becomes a disbeliever.” This shows that he does not mean all action, but rather individual acts, as will be detailed.

Al-Ḥawālī said, speaking about the Murjiʾah: “Rather, they declared that prostrating to an idol is not disbelief in itself, and it is astonishing that some who attribute themselves to the Salaf agree with them in part of this.” Al-Albānī commented: “A false insinuation.”

And al-Ḥawālī said, speaking about al-Albānī’s treatise Ḥukm Tārik al-Ṣalāh (The Ruling on the One Who Abandons Prayer): “He made the one who abandons it entirely a believer among the people of intercession, and built his whole treatise upon this.” Al-Albānī said: “That is not so; the treatise is about the one who abandons prayer out of laziness.”

To set out the Shaykh’s creed in this chapter precisely, it should be known that the Shaykh’s position, upon which he lived and died, is that a person does not become a disbeliever by abandoning any of the actions, even prayer — and the disagreement concerning prayer is well known. We ourselves believe that one who persists in abandoning it out of negligence and laziness is a disbeliever with major disbelief, and that consensus was established on this; we have a treatise on it in the series Mā Lā Yasaʿ al-Shaykh Jahluh. But what concerns us here is this: may it be said of one who differs on this issue that he has agreed with the Murjiʾah? There is no doubt that describing everyone who differs on this issue — the issue of the one who abandons prayer — as having agreed with the Murjiʾah is injustice and ignorance, which many of the people of knowledge have warned against, foremost among them Shaykh al-Islām (Ibn Taymiyyah). Since this matter is clear, we will not dwell on it.

Even so, we need to explain the Shaykh’s position on it in order to answer the other misconceptions raised about some of his expressions, such as his words about the one who abandons the genus of action (jins al-ʿamal), and his statement that action is a condition for the completeness of faith.

Here are the accusations made against the Shaykh, and the response to them: