The differences between the Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī refuters were certainly great, but there was one thing that they agreed upon: Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim were central to what Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was preaching, regardless of whether his use of them was legitimate. As the nineteenth-century Ḥanbalī muftī of Mecca Muḥammad ibn Ḥumayd (d. 1295/1878) remarked, in a statement that all the refuters would have agreed with, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb treated the words of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim as scripture: “He saw their words as a proof text not admitting of interpretation [naṣṣan lā yaqbalu
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