MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION SEPARATISTS, HERETICAL MADHHABS

There are two major groups of Muslims. One of them is the group termed Ahl as-Sunnat. Muslims in this major group, which is the (only) right and correct group, and which is called (the Madhhab of) Ahl as-Sunnat, have parted into four different Madhhabs. (Muslims in) these four groups hold the same tenets of belief, the same îmân. 

There is no difference between them in Islam. All of them hold the beliefs of the Ahl as-Sunna. The second major group consists of people who do not hold the same tenets of belief as that of the Sunnî group and called people of bid’a, i.e. the “lâ madhhabî.” Examples of these aberrant groups are Shiites and Wahhâbîs. People who follow such heretics as Ibni Taymiyya and Jemâladdîn Afghânî and Muhammad ’Abduh and Sayyid Qutb and Mawdûdî, and people who call themselves Tablîgh-i-jamâ’at, and Wahhâbîs are (in the aberrant major group called) Ahl-i-bid’at. Wahhâbîs call themselves “members of the fifth madhhab.” This claim of theirs is not true. There is no such thing as a “fifth madhhab.” Today there is no way other than learning Islamic knowledge from the ’ilm al-hâl books of one of these four Madhhabs. Everyone chooses the Madhhab that is easy for them to follow. They read its books and learn it. They do everything compatibly with it, follow it, and become a member of it (taqlîd). Because it is easy for a person to learn what he hears and sees from his parents, a Muslim usually belongs to the Madhhab of his parents. There being four Madhhabs instead of being one is a convenience for Muslims. It is permissible to leave one Madhhab and join another, yet it will take years to study and learn the new one, and the work done for learning the former one will be of no use and may even cause confusion while doing many things. It is by no means permissible to leave one Madhhab because one dislikes it, for Islamic scholars said that it will be disbelief (kufr) to dislike the Salaf as-sâlihîn or to say that they were ignorant.