and by smoking, playing backgammon, and even gambling in coffee-houses and elsewhere, while the radio is broadcasting Allah’s words: “O you who believe! Intoxicants, gambling, idolatrous altars, and divining arrows are but filth from the handiwork of Satan; so shun them that you may prosper” [al-Māʾidah 5:90]. They hear this and similar verses being recited, yet they remain absorbed in their conversation and pastimes as though there were plugs in their ears. So tell me, Ibn Ḥazm: are these people unbelievers? Rather, their behaviour reminds me of the saying of Ibn ʿAbbās and other early authorities, “disbelief short of full disbelief.”¹ Not every act of disbelief expels its doer from the faith. Accordingly, these people and those like them receive a share—each according to his proportion—of the censure mentioned in the verse.

The celebrated Andalusian exegete Ibn ʿAṭiyyah indicated this very point in his Al-Muḥarrar al-Wajīz, 13 / 19—apparently in response to Ibn Ḥazm as well—when he wrote:

“The verse retains its meaning for the community of Muhammad, though not so that they lead people from Allah’s path through outright unbelief or make a mockery of the verses and thus incur the stated threat, but so that they neglect worship, waste their time on what is reprehensible, and join the ranks of the sinners and the deficient.”

I must draw attention to a contradiction into which Ibn Ḥazm has fallen. His statement under the first point necessarily concedes the authenticity of the interpretation cited from Ibn ʿAbbās, Ibn Masʿūd, and others; otherwise, he would have hastened to weaken it instead of saying, “No one’s statement is binding….”

Yet in his treatise on amusements he does the exact opposite: first, he omits the aforesaid remark, and second, he openly declares the report weak, saying on p. 97:

“Nothing has been authentically established from any Companion of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ; it is merely the view of certain exegetes who are not …”