Al-Risala

So the first group is people like Imam Shafi'i is very explicit.

In his Kitab al-Risalah, which is one of the first books ever written in Islam, Imam Shafi'i dies two O four Hijri.

That's really early.

That's before Bukhari by two generations.

Imam Shafi'i is super early, right? Two O four Hijri.

And Imam Shafi'i writes in his Kitab al-Risalah that there are two types of Bid`ah.

A Bid`ah that is reprehensible and that is into the religion, and then a Bid`ah that basically affirms the goals of the Sharia, and that Bid`ah, he says, we don't call it a religious Bid`ah.

That Bid`ah, we call it a linguistic Bid`ah because the word Bid`ah in Arabic means something new.

It added to the ability that he could memorize very quickly.

He was brilliant, and he would understand things very quickly, and is able to understand SubhanAllah, and that's what led him eventually to write the first and most important of his books, Ar-Risalah, and about fundamentals of jurisprudence.

He's able to encapsulate and understand fiqh matters and bring them back to their roots and have principles that he can base all these fiqh matters on these principles were in practice before but a shafi'i was able to bring them all together and put them coherently in one book rahimahullah Qultu li Abi, the son of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal can be counted as one of the students of Ash-Shafi'i.

He says, ayyu rajul inkana Ash-Shafi'i, what type of man was Ash-Shafi'i? Because I see that you make a lot of dua for him.

They don't get into these things.

They're actually almost like an Athari version within the Ash'ari in the sense that, uh, Sheikh Rami in Sur told me one time that he showed Murabit al-Hajj one of the Ash'ari books, and the man was doing khuld.

Khuld means to really get into some subject that's not necessarily mentioned in the Quran, neither did Allah obligate us to study it, right? Or to know it, or to take a position on it.

And he's going in.

A lot of times the automa- their argumentation is on the fuzzy matters.

All right.

So now we get to, he leaves off that, these books, and he starts reading hadith and diving into hadith and believing exactly what the Prophet brought, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.

And you also have categorization.