The doctrine of Ahl al-sunna vs the Salafist movement

Know
that people have agreed generation after generation and century after century
that the Mujtahid
Imams only derive legal rulings from the Qur'an and the Sunna after they have
completely studied the Sunna and its sciences and the Qur'an with respect to its
rulings and understanding, in a way unmatched by those who followed them in
later times. On
the contrary, the ulama, generation after generation, take hold of what they
said, scholars of the caliber of al-Nawawi, al-Rafi`i, Taqi al-Din al-Subki,
Ibn Hazm, Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn al-Jawzi, scholars like Fakhr al-Din
al-Razi, al-Tahawi, al-Qasim, al-Qarafi: all were imitating the opinions of the
Mujtahids and their followers, despite the fact that each one of these leading
figures and those before them had delved deep into every category of the
Islamic sciences. Yet and still, they knew that they had not arrived at the
level of deriving law from Qur'an and Sunna independently. What's more, they
understood their own limits.

Know
that to declare a Muslim a unbeliever is no small matter. The ulama, among them
Ibn Taymiyya
and Ibn Qayyim, have agreed that the ignorant person and the one who makes a
mistake in this community, even if what is done makes its perpetrator an idolater
or disbeliever, and that person pleads the excuse of ignorance or that he made
a mistake until a proof is explained to him in a lucid and clear fashion, a
situation like such a person's is ambiguous. The
Muslim might have joined in him disb