The forebears
group · 3 works · 5 mentions · 6 anchored passages
one of the forebears · بعض السلف · al-salaf · السلف · the creed of the forebears · عقيدة السلف · علماء السلف
in the texts
Adab al-wazīr
The salaf, earlier generations of Muslims, cited as an anonymous class of authority for maxims of self-restraint.
Beware the pride of anger, for it delivers you to the abasement of apology.
The second is that he report it to the king if it is weighty, though he may fold it away from him if it is slight, so as to keep clear of the arbitrariness that alienates and to be safe from the rancour that leaves its mark.
you have of your world only that with which you set right your abode hereafter.
Bayān zaghl al-ʻilm wa-al-ṭalab
The early generations, invoked as the authors of a definite creed, as enemies of speculative theology, and as the model of scholars who fled office — and defended by the annotator against being split into two mutually repudiating parties.
The principles of religion of the latter-day men (al-khalaf) are what they have composed treatises upon and built up on reason and logic — and the forebears used to inveigh against whoever travelled that road and brand him an innovator.
or had you a trade, you would resemble the scholars of old, who never set eyes on colleges and never heard of endowed posts, who fled when they were sought for the judgeship, who made worship of their learning and gave it freely to men, and were content with a coarse garment and a crust — as the imam Abū Isḥāq, the author of al-Tanbīh, was not long ago, and as the shaykh Muḥyī al-Dīn, the author o …
For the upshot of his words would be that the forebears were two mutually repudiating parties in the very root of belief, some of the latter-day men following the one party and some the other.
Risālat al-Wāridāt
The salaf, the earliest Muslim generations whose creed Riḍā presents as ʻAbduh's final settled position, against the speculative and Ashʻarī formulations of the epistle.
In the last years of his life he became firmly grounded in the creed of the forebears (*al-salaf*), after having been guided to it in outline, as he set it out in his gloss upon the ʻAḍudiyyah.