“Those Who Praise Yazid Have No Faith”

Imam Shihab ad-Din Abu al-Fadhl Ahmad ibn Nur ad-Din ‘Ali ibn Hajr al-‘Asqalani wrote, in his Fath al-Bari, “Those who praise Yazid have no faith,” referring directly to Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah.  This is not a minor scholarly aside.  It is one of the most severe judgements a hadits authority can pronounce, embedded inside the single most authoritative commentary on Swahih al-Bukhari that Sunni scholarship has ever produced.

Imam ibn Hajr al-‘Asqalani served as Chief Qadhi of Egypt under the Mamluk Sultanate, and spent roughly twenty-five years compiling Fath al-Bari, a commentary that runs to well over a dozen printed volumes depending on the edition, and that subsequent generations of Sunni scholars have treated as effectively indispensable to serious ahadits study.  This is not marginal commentary tucked into a footnote by a fringe writer.  It is a considered statement, placed deliberately inside the definitive explanation of the most authoritative ahadits collection in Sunni Islam, by the scholar whose name is still invoked as the final word on ahadits criticism eight centuries later.

Imam Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Hanbal told Imam Abu al-Faraj ‘Abd ar-Rahman ibn ‘Ali ibn al-Jawzy that Yazid plundered the city of Madina and massacred its inhabitants, and forbade any hadits narrated on Yazid’s authority from ever being recorded.  Imam ibn Hajr al-‘Asqalani’s statement extends that same severity from the transmission of ahadits to the character of anyone who praises the man.  Two of Sunni Islam's most cited authorities, separated by nearly six centuries, reached the identical conclusion independently, through the tools of their own respective disciplines.  That is not coincidence.  That is convergence on a documented historical record.

A persistent apologetic current, often amplified today through revisionist online content and certain politically motivated retellings of early Islamic history, works hard to rehabilitate Yazid’s image, framing the Battle of al-Harrah and the killing of Sayyidina Husayn ibn ‘Ali at Karbala as regrettable but understandable acts of a beleaguered ruler managing rebellion.  Anyone repeating that framing is not offering a nuanced historical corrective.  He is contradicting Imam ibn Hajr al-‘Asqalani directly, on the explicit terms Imam ibn Hajr himself set: praising Yazid is not a matter of differing scholarly opinion.  It is, in the words of the very man whose commentary anchors Sunni ahadits scholarship, a mark of a man with no faith.

Sunni orthodoxy does not require silence on Yazid out of some generalised respect for early Islamic history.  It requires the opposite, and it has required it from its own most authoritative voices for well over a thousand years.  Imam ibn Hajr al-‘Asqalani did not hedge his language, and neither should anyone citing him today.