he behaves as though he had been forbidden his very religion and imagines that, by giving it up, he has been cut off from Allah and deprived of his share of the divine bounty!

Such people are misguided by unanimous agreement of the Muslim scholars. No leading authority of Islam has ever said that turning this practice into a religion and a path to Allah is permissible; on the contrary, whoever makes it a religion and a path to Allah is himself astray and a misleader, standing in opposition to the consensus of the Muslims.

Whoever looks only at the outward act and discusses it without considering the doer and his intention is an ignorant person who speaks about the religion without knowledge.

(Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā 11/631–633)

Thirdly, it is an established principle among the scholars that one may not seek nearness to Allah through anything He has not legislated, even if the act itself is lawful—such as giving the adhān (call to prayer) for the two ʿId prayers, performing the so-called Ṣalāt al-Raghāʾib, invoking blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ when someone sneezes, or when a merchant offers his goods to a customer, and the like—innumerable newly-introduced matters that Imam al-Shāṭibī (may Allah have mercy on him) termed “additive innovations” (al-bidʿ al-iḍāfiyyah). In his monumental work al-Iʿtiṣām he conclusively demonstrated that they fall under the Prophet’s ﷺ comprehensive statement: “Every innovation is misguidance, and every misguidance is in the Fire.”¹

Once this is understood, it follows a fortiori that seeking Allah’s nearness through something He has forbidden is itself forbidden—indeed, gravely so—because it entails opposition and defiance of Allah’s law, and Allah has threatened whoever