theologian Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah. Creed The self-understanding of traditionalists is, that their basic views and doctrines can be traced back to the teachings of the Islamic prophet before what they saw as the unacceptable blending of Islamic orthodoxy with the opinions of men رَأْي (raʼy) and the customs of peoples, leading to heterodoxy, or heresy. They condemned the synthesis of "philosophies" (that is, un-Islamic ideas) with the doctrines of the religion as taught by the Islamic prophet and elucidated by his companions, and thus they called for the subordination of all religious disputes to the literal interpretation of the Islamic Scriptures and the prophetic traditions, while also valuing reports of the opinions of earlier generations of believers over later jurists and judges, as the earlier Muslims were held to be professors of orthodoxy. Many of them, including Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the eponymous founder of the Hanbali school of law, nonetheless did not hesitate to reject and criticize the reported opinions and actions of the Islamic prophet's contemporaries, such as Abu Umamah al Bahili's reported greeting of Christians, when they were deemed to be clashing with orthodoxy. The attribution of orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy to figures, however, varies greatly between different religious polemics, especially with regard to the Hanafi school and its eponymous originator, Abu Hanifa. Although Ahmad ibn Hanbal's son, Abdullah, ascribed to his father the condemnation of Abu Hanifa multiple times in his compendium Kitāb al-Sunnah, a number of medieval and modern traditionalists consider the eponyms of the four major Sunni schools of Islamic law (Abu Hanifa, Malik ibn Anas, Al-Shafiʽi, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal) to have all been adherents of "Ahl al-Hadith". Scholars of the Ahl al-Hadith strongly condemned the doctrines of Kalam (speculative theology) and its various schools such as Ash'arism and Mu'tazilism; accusing them of deviating from the Qur'an and Hadith. They believed that Tawhid (Islamic monotheism) is to be understood strictly on the basis of Qur'an and Hadith, shunning Kalam and affirming the Scriptures Bila Kayfa, "without asking how". Ahl al-Hadith held that the zahir (literal; apparent) meaning of the Qur'an and the hadith have sole authority in matters of faith and that the use of rational disputation is forbidden even if it verifies the truth. They did not attempt to conceptualize the meanings of the Qur'an rationally, especially those related to the attributes of Allah, accepting them without asking "how" (bi-la kaifa), and asserted that