Massoud Vahedi

Never ask a non-Hanbali scholar to explain the Hanbali madhhab's position on doing mash over socks. They will give you the false impression that the Hanbali madhhab only permits wiping over Timberland construction boots that can be walked on for 15 years.

The respected father of Shaykh Ali Hofioni has passed away. May Allah have mercy upon him and grant him Jannat al-Firdaws. We have all benefited immensely from Shaykh Ali's lectures and talks. This goodness and spiritual leadership can all be traced to the Shaykh's father, who cherished and served the Muslim community as a selfless leader and through many sacrifices, made his son a great Imam in the Greatest Toronto Area. The funeral prayer for the Shaykh's respected father will be offered this Friday at Ummah Nabawiah Masjid in Etobicoke, after the Friday prayer.

I will in sha' Allah be giving a short presentation on Ibn Rajab's work on qawa'id fiqhiyyah (Islamic legal maxims) next week Monday at the Philosophy of Madhhab Law Conference. I am the smallest person in this Panel. As you can see, I am surrounded by heavyweights. 🙂 For details regarding the conference, please refer to this link: https://ghum.kuleuven.be/lcsics/activities1/call-for-papers-philosophy-of-madhhab-law-intersections-of-fiqh-theology-and-sufism-29-september-2026-leuven-be-online

You know the saying, “Reports are only as reliable as their transmitters.” If you want to verify a report that has been conveyed to you, there is no doubt that you will want to know who transmitted that report. The transmitter may be someone whose transmission you rely upon, or you may find that he is not reliable in transmitting information. Perhaps, if you investigate and demand verification, you will discover that there are unknown people whose identities are not even known. At that point, you begin to question whether the report should be accepted. As you all know, we are now afflicted by rumors, especially with the existence of modern means of communication – whether through the internet, email messages, or through what are called social-media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and similar platforms, such as WhatsApp and the like, or even text messages and so on. We find that each of us is now exposed to a huge number of these reports and messages, without knowing which are authentic and which are unsound. Therefore, verification is necessary. Sometimes a person may even become involved in transmitting a report because he is hasty in passing it on, only for it to turn out that the report is not established. In reality, the science of hadith benefits us in our everyday lives. It benefits us in our educational lives as well. The principle of verification is a principle that demonstrates careful thought, deliberation, and wisdom, and it teaches us to deal with matters with calmness and deliberation."

Studying the science of Hadith should turn you into a critical evaluator when dealing with ALL types of reports, not just the transmitted narrations from the Prophet 'alayhi al-Salah wa al-Salam. Its verification methods and rules can be applied to the news and reports that affect us in our everyday lives, and can save us from absentmindedly accepting lies, rumours, and conspiracy theories. Shaykh Sa'd al-Humayyid said: "If we look at the science of hadith, we find that it is a discipline that serves the hadith of the Prophet 'alayhi al-Salah wa al-Salam, just as it also serves reports that are generally transmitted – whether they concern the Companions, the Successors, previous nations, or even events in our present reality. You know the saying, “Reports are only as reliable as their transmitters.” If you want to verify a report that has been conveyed to you, there is no doubt that you will want to know who transmitted that report. The transmitter may be someone whose transmission you rely upon, or you

Two uncomfortable facts reflect problems with the Da'wah scene, and problems with clique scholarship: 1. In-group and out-group dynamics. Everyone likes to criticize Uthman ibn Farooq for his Arabic mistakes, but hyper-focusing on him is a problem. When Arabic mistakes of a similar level are found in the writings or talks of other speakers, suddenly there is pushback and accusations that the whole thing is nitpicking. If a traditionalist figure consistently gets Arabic terms and book titles wrong, are his traditionalist friends going to address the elephant in the room? Or is it only Salafi figures like Uthman who should be criticized? 2. Inconsistently applying principles. When Daniel Haqiqatjou was caught deleting the crucial conditional particle "If" for a Yaqeen Institute article he was criticizing in 2020, he was (rightfully) criticized by many. And many du'at - relying on the principles of the science of hadith - said that such lying would make him an unreliable figure. I wonder whether the same standard will now be upheld for a figure who tampered with the text of his original post to deny the allegation that he erred in getting a book title correct.

Shaykh Musa Furber: "Defence is denied to those who publicly diddle their own dalil."

Unfortunately, this person ALTERED the text of the original Tweet in his so-called “direct copy and paste”. In the ORIGINAL Tweet, he clearly used the incorrect word “al-Murba’” twice. In the so-called “direct copy and paste”, he has altered it to al-Rawd al-Murbiʿ. Compare the two images and see for yourself. I did not know lying was so easy. Spelling and transliteration mistakes are a sign of sloppiness. But the bigger issue is covering up your mistakes and make it sound like you are the victim. Let it be known that this individual, who teaches hadith in more than one seminary, has no problem altering his own past words and deflecting blame on others.

When Doubling Down Leads to Lying A few days ago, I raised concerns about an individual being unable to correctly spell the name of book titles, such as al-Rawd al-Murbi’, on their Twitter/X page (original Tweet is attached on Image 1). Instead of writing the name correctly, the person wrote it as “Rawd al-Murba” or “al-Rawd al-Murba’”, failing to realize that the second word of the title is an ism fa’il (active participle). The individual responded in a post, claiming that I had misrepresented him. To prove this, he provided a “direct copy and paste” of the Post’s text (Image 2), demonstrating that he, after all, had actually written it as Rawd al-Murbiʿ. The only mistake he made was not make the two words agree in definiteness, so no big deal. Problem solved? No. Look at the text of the two pictures and compare them. What do you see?

If a writer cannot discern mudaf/mudaf ilayhi and mawsuf/sifah phrases (which is Level 1 Arabic by the way), it is a serious issue. If they can't distinguish ism fa'il (active participle) from ism maf'ul (passive participle) when speaking about the titles of books, it is likewise a serious issue. It's al-Rawd al-Murbi', not al-Murba'. 🙂 We don't say Zad al-Mustaqna' and then say it is just a transliteration mistake.

In other words, we cannot assume that if the likes of Ibn Taymiyyah were alive today, that they would somehow hold hands in solidarity with modernists in advocating for the equating of the testimony of women and men simply because the “times have changed.” Even if Ibn Taymiyyah’s stance was purely driven by sociological reasoning (which it wasn’t), he would still scold us for various reasons upon seeing how many Muslims have become lax in their gender interactions and for the radical transformation in gender roles exhibited in particular Muslim polities. Someone like Ibn Taymiyyah would not change his stance on a law he deems to be fixed in the Shariah due to societal changes that are Islamically questionable, to begin with. In summary, the scholars were primarily driven to adopt the views that they did by reading scripture. They read Qur’anic passages such as 2:282, 4:24, etc. and ahadith referring to the general prophetic remark pertaining to the deficiency of women’s aql and its casual correlation to the probative value of their testimony relative to men. They recognized that these scriptural texts were fixed concerning these rulings on women. They saw that scripture was discriminating against the testimony of women as a gender group in certain instances. But why? What really is/are the reason/reasons for this? Here, the scholars differed in interpreting why and this led to different camps proffering different reasons, which in turn directly impacted their analogical reasoning when they sought to apply rulings in spheres beyond what was mentioned in scripture. But one thing was certain in the eyes of all these scholars and that is that there is something inherently connected to women that Islam considers when discriminating against the probative value of their testimony, relative to men, in at least specific instances. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐢𝐱𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧. Undoubtedly, the way one interprets these texts would greatly impact the qiyas that would follow in extending the rulings to different domains. To think that modernists with their gender-egalitarian agendas could somehow appropriate any of these mainstream scholarly stances to represent their own is highly misinformed and wishful thinking.

Moreover, this could hardly be said to be the unique stances of Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibnul Qayyim anyway (see page 1042 onward from the first study that I linked to above). And even if Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibnul Qayyim permitted women’s testimony in all spheres as some try to claim, as Fadel himself acknowledges, “One should not infer from their analysis, however, that Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyya believed there was no difference in the probative value of men's and women's testimony.” So we are back to square one. But once again, are we to understand that Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibnul Qayyim, and the other scholars that Fadel cited did not recognize that femininity was inherently the ratio legis behind the rulings directly deduced from the plain reading of the Qur’an and hadith? Hardly. Their appeals to scripture and the specificity of their nuanced stances demonstrated that their rational arguments were only devised 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 they reached after having made a scriptural case about specific base rulings (e.g., women cannot testify in cases of had of zina according to 4:24, etc.). Could scholars have erred in inferring the additional reasons for the scriptural rulings and consequently misapplied qiyas in their extension to domains not explicitly backed by textual proofs? Sure. The scholars have disagreed on several of these issues, but they also formed an overwhelming consensus in other areas as well. Their attempts to rationalize these rulings are no different from our attempts to rationalize why eating pork is forbidden. They are making ijtihad to deduce the reasons behind 𝐖𝐇𝐘 women’s testimony is discriminated against in certain spheres explicitly mentioned by scripture, and 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 they are or should continue to be. They are doing this for the purpose of qiyas so that they can decide whether to extend similar rulings to other spheres or not.

In fact, there is no interaction with the bulk of these evidences in Fadel’s paper. He does not engage with the Qur’anic and hadith evidence. He ignores the statements of the Sahabah and Salaf that served as a precedent for the scholars. Fadel only selectively chose to hone in on deduced attempts to rationalize the wisdoms of the rulings and then tried to poke holes in them. But these ijtihadi rational attempts for the purpose of qiyas are the least evidentiary in weight in the eyes of the scholars whose ultimate concern is the scriptural proofs. Fadel states: “One would expect that any discussion of women's testimony in medieval Islamic law would be centered on Qur’an 2:282. In fact, neither al-Qarafi nor al-Tarabulusi refers to it.” This demonstrates Fadel’s lack of familiarity with the variety of textual evidences that are employed in this subject (e.g., scholars would appeal to verses like 24:4 to negate women’s testimony in capital punishment cases like zina). It is not only about 2:282. But again, is Fadel’s comment even true? A quick glimpse through Al-Qarafi’s works like adh-Dhakheera, Nafaa’is al-Usul, Al-Furuq, etc. shows that he does reference 2:282. And does Fadel seriously want to suggest that Al-Tarabulusi was not driven by scripture in his views like his remaining Hanafi peers? Also, there is a concern with Fadel’s presentation of the stance of Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibnul Qayyim. He makes it appear that they accept women's testimony unqualifiedly in all situations as long as their testimony is credible. His citation of Ibnul Qayyim was partial and stopped short of an important qualifier where Ibnul Qayyim states, “and for that reason, her testimony by herself is accepted 𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐮𝐦𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬” (ولهذا تقبل شهادتها وحدها في مواضع). Someone reading Fadel’s article does not get that impression and would likely assume that Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibnul Qayyim extended this to all cases such as hudud, for instance. In fact, what they had in mind were matters that men were not typically concerned with (see Ibn Taymiyyah’s stance clarified here https://www.islamweb.net/ar/fatwa/56530/ , and as for Ibnul Qayyim, he was pretty clear when he said: فالأقْوالُ ثَلاثَةٌ، أرْجَحُها: أنَّهُ تَجُوزُ شَهادَةُ النِّساءِ مُتَفَرِّقاتٍ فِيما لا يَطَّلِعُ عَلَيْهِ الرِّجالُ غالِبًا). And Fadel cannot argue that Ibn Taymiyyah’s reasoning strictly considered sociological factors, for Ibnul Qayyim in his Toroq al-Hukmiyyah cites Ibn Taymiyyah’s appeal to the hadith on the deficiency of women’s aql and reasoned from that hadith that women’s aql is less than that of a man, however, where aql isn’t relevant to testimony such as matters where first hand sensorial experience is involved (e.g. birth, menstruation, skin defects, etc.), Ibn Taymiyyah did not find deficiency of aql to be a relevant factor.

As for the article itself, I found it somewhat ironic that Fadel did not realize the self-contradictory lens through which he views the classical scholars. On the one hand, Fadel acknowledges that classical scholars accepted women’s testimony in “normative” spheres like narrating ahadeeth, in addition to accepting their legal opinions. Furthermore, he recognizes that the scholars were nuanced in their levels of acceptance of women’s testimony. Yet, Fadel finds this “most surprising.” Why? Because this reality does not align with Fadel’s theory that Qur’anic exegetes (who were also jurists) were guilty of “allowing the misogynistic assumptions of the reader to dominate the text” and that the jurist’s approach to the topic “had as much to do with male chauvinism.” Reading Fadel’s article itself, it becomes evident that the scholars were exerting effort to deduce the reasons behind why scripture discriminated against women’s testimony in certain instances. What prompted them to delve deeply into their carefully nuanced analysis of probative values of testimonies in different spheres was their submission (𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐠𝐲𝐧𝐲) to fixed scripturally-based rulings, ones that accord to the obvious and self-evident meaning of the words of Allah and the Prophet. They would consequently work off of these scriptural texts to determine the 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐡𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 ratio legis (i.e., reasons beyond the gender) to serve as a basis for their analogical reasoning when issuing rulings in different spheres (not mentioned by scripture) where testimony takes place. Otherwise, if misogyny was their primary driving force, they could have easily been more stringent and restrictive in scope in the rulings they issued. They could have added layers of conditions for accepting ahadith transmitted by women (e.g., must also be attested by men, or must not be contradicted by a hadith transmitted by men, etc.), for instance, but they did not. One could read any proper study about “the testimony of women in jurisprudence” and see the textual evidences that prompted the jurists to adopt the nuanced stances that they did when it comes to women’s testimonies in different domains. (Some examples of studies are: https://mksq.journals.ekb.eg/article_7752...,https://www.asjp.cerist.dz/en/downArticle/396/6/2/61079, and https://units.imamu.edu.sa/.../sofm/Documents/khdair1.pdf)

Thus, when it comes to such laws, what is prone to change with time is the wisdom, not the ruling itself, when the ratio legis remains applicable and present. We could say that a 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐰𝐢𝐬𝐝𝐨𝐦 of a ruling deduced via Ijtihad served its purpose a long time ago or is limitedly serving its purpose in specific geographical locations or circumstances, but that does not change the fact that there could be other wisdoms of these rulings unknown to us. Some, like Fadel, might not find it intellectually satisfying to concede that we at many times do not know the wisdom 𝒐𝒓 𝒂𝒍𝒍 the wisdoms behind divine legislations. It does not mean they do not exist; it is just that we may not know them. As scholars have said, that could be intentional so that a higher wisdom is actualized, namely the spiritual maslahah of submitting to Allah and His commands. This makes full sense, and there is nothing irrational about this. I would be curious to hear an actual cogent philosophical critique of this reasoning if there is one. In light of this, it is wrong for Fadel to conclude in his article that “one can no longer simply assume that modernist interpretations of Qur'an 2:282 represent a radical break from Islamic law.” Modernist interpretations are guided by hermeneutical methods and underlying ideological premises anathema to mainstream Sunnism. Moreover, I find it disingenuous for Fadel to advise, as he repeatedly does in his works, modernists and feminists to engage in “exploiting problems and tensions that have long been recognized to exist within Islamic law” to infiltrate mainstream Islamic settings under the misleading guise of a shared ideological and hermeneutical framework.

The primary one appears to be his unwarranted conflation between the ratio legis (علة), or legislative intent or purpose, and wisdom (حكمة) of a ruling (an example of such a conflation committed by several modernists can be found here https://www.facebook.com/5039.../posts/10165957520065245/...). Even if one assumes that the ratio legis and wisdom are one and the same, it is not always obvious whether a fiqhi ruling is interlinked with a single ratio legis or multiple ones. This could lead to problems where people attribute a ratio legis to a ruling that is only valid in partially describing legislative intent, thereby giving the false impression that in the absence of this partial ratio legis, the ruling no longer applies. For example, it is wrong to say that 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 ratio legis for the prohibition of consuming swine is because pigs are dirty and eat dirty things. Why? Because that would then entail that if pig farming were to change in the future and pigs were raised in cleaner environments and were to be exclusively fed clean food, that would make their meat consumption halal. This is problematic, especially since the ratio legis is not textually relayed to us but is rather deduced as 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒔𝒐𝒏𝒔 for the prohibition of eating pork. Such deductions are at other times contentious and prone to error and cannot be ascertained with confidence. An important principle agreed upon in meaning by the scholars is that it is baseless to stipulate that the only ratio legis for a divinely ordained legislation is malleable to change to the point that it nullifies scripture (كل تعليل يتضمن إبطال النص باطل). And this is the mistake that Fadel has committed, yet again (as he did in his article on women’s wilaayah as can be seen here https://www.facebook.com/5039.../posts/10165952741870245/...), whereby he has neglected to recognize that the actual ratio legis for why men’s testimony is 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 valued more than women’s is, 𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦, the 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐭𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟. God’s specific method of communicating this law in the Qur’an, in addition to the hadeeth of the Prophet (peace be upon him) linking deficiency of aql to women’s testimony (a critical hadeeth that Fadel strangely did not engage with sufficiently in his piece), entails that this is a matter from the fixed specific dictates of the Shari’ah (المقدّرات الشرعية) where there is no ijtihad permitted in changing the foundation of this ruling. Fixed specific dictates feature prominently in acts of worship (e.g., how to pray, Zakah being 2.5%, etc.), but also include things like inheritance laws, hudud, etc. Since Fadel claims to incline toward the Maliki Madhab, he could read up on the Maliki madhab’s stance on such fixed specific laws in a recently published article by Dr. Ayman Mustafa (Ph.D. in fiqh from The University of Jordan), entitled: المقدرات الشرعية عند المالكية بين الظنية والقطعية.

Bassam Zawadi's Critical Review of Mohammed Fadel's Article I would like to make a few remarks concerning Dr. Mohammad Fadel’s article “Two Women, One Man: Knowledge, Power, and Gender in Medieval Sunni Legal Thought.” The article addresses the testimonial value of women in contrast to men in Sunni legal discourse. Having read a number of his articles, it has become clear to me that there is a flawed methodological pattern in Fadel’s approach to fiqh.

Al-Shaybānī and Ibn ʿUlayya, about whom the book adds considerable new material, are viewed almost entirely through the lens of al-Shāfiʿī’s Kitāb al-Umm, which records debates with unnamed interlocutors whom El Shamsy identifies with these two figures (plausibly but still not definitively; the passage cited in n. 11 on p. 46 does not in fact name al-Shaybānī). One wonders whether a close reading of Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ or other non-Shāfiʿī sources might not complicate El Shamsy’s interpretation of these two figures (and implicitly of all early Muslim jurists) as proponents of a common ideology of communal tradition .... Closer study of non-Shāfiʿī materials will undoubtedly reveal that al-Shāfiʿī’s introduction of a textualist ideology was not as novel or dramatic an innovation as El Shamsy makes it out to be." - David R. Vishanoff, book review of El Shamsy's The Canonization of Islamic Law