Dear listeners, welcome back to conflicted.

I'm Thomas Small, and this is the second part of our epic exploration of the life and

times of Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal, the great 8th and 9th century Islamic scholar, who's

teaching still to find the way Islamists think, act, and worship today.

If you haven't heard the first part, do not listen on.

Go back. In part one, we covered the world in which Ahmed lived in the 8th century Iraq.

We set the scene. We built up his character. Go listen to that. Come back here and finish this

great story. Amin Dean, you're here with me as you always are. Hello, Amin.

I'm always with you, Thomas, wherever you are. For you are my disciple, and I'll always be with you.

No, no, no. Let's get right back into it. Ahmed bin Hanbal, let's go.

Amen. I think it would be good right at the start to remind listeners why we're talking about

Ahmed bin Hanbal. He's very, very relevant. Still, to the worldview, the theology,

the religious mentality, the piety, even of modern-day salafis, including salafi jihadists.

Of course, because he is, to be more precise, the reason why many celifists, jihadists,

groups, and ideologies and movements have this rich narrative of eschatology, thanks to him.

The rich narrative of eschatology, by which you mean stories of the end times, of the end of the

world and the role that they believe, the salafi jihadists believe they're playing in that drama,

that epic end of the world drama. Exactly. The prophecies, because Ahmed bin Hanbal,

through his method of collecting the hadith, did not shift enough through the narratives and

wasn't skeptical enough of both the narrators and the text, in order to weed out the

Abbasid propaganda, which then seeped through, as we said in the last episode, into the imagination,

of both, by the way, of both. She answered me as cathological visions.

...