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The “Salafis,” ignoring the authorities that fail to support them and relying instead on what they can use wherever they find it, turn with glee to Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Wahhab’s aberrant statement in his Three Principles of Onenessalready cited: “One who claims to know something from knowledge of the Unseen is a taghut or false deity.” They apply this falsehood to saints but some of them fall short, in their selective logic, of applying it to Prophets, and by so doing desert Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab: for his statement evidently does not preclude anyone — prophet, angel, jinn, or any human being — from falling within its scope.
Yet even with respect to saints the false bases of their thinking had long since been exposed by one of the scholars of the Community, Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Hajar al-Haytami. Would that they had only acquainted themselves with his fatwa on the matter and reflected upon it, instead of giving precedence to a lesser scholar on the basis of their whim. This fatwa is translated in full in The Reliance of the Traveller, from where we quote it.
