[elects]

I've always been delighted and have appreciated your posts; I thought you were "Salafi" but it seems you are simply non-Salafi Hanbali, right?

Pardon the meddling and you obviously are not obliged to reply; it was just a small "surprise" of mine!

I believe in respecting mad'habs as legitimate means to practice shari'ah for whomever chooses or does not choose to follow one and that the layman has no business deriving fiqh rulings on his lonesome, but I adhere to the aqeedah of Ibn Taymiyyah as I believe it represents the summation of Imam Ahmad's aqeedah.

I do not have any truck with the Murji'ah of the era who will make every possible excuse for political secularists and I have no truck with modernists either.

Whatever this summation of factors makes me, is what I am.

Similarly, I do not discount Salih al-Fawzaan's scholarship in many areas; a lot of people who prefer madhabs would be pleasantly surprised by his Mulakhlas as it is very straight Hanbali for the most part except with his own tarjih in areas that often coincides with Ibn Taymiyyah's tarjih. My statement 'their own scholars' should be understood in the light of the fact that many Shawkanite-Salafis take him as a reference point selectively (ignoring all his statements about secularism and many points of fiqh) and as such quoting from him would be very good to undermine their positions.