and the like. People have grown up accustomed to such practices, passing them down from fathers to sons, and most of them have no idea where they originated. Once the ruling is explained to someone who does them, he must desist; if he persists, he falls back into the first category.

The second kind
is a practice that was not originally taken from them, though they too happen to observe it. Here there is no inherent danger of imitation, yet one may lose the virtue of deliberately differing from them. Whether the act is deemed disliked or forbidden, then, hinges on a separate legal proof beyond the mere fact of resemblance: it is no more certain that we are copying them than that they are copying us. Still, recommending its abandonment for the sake of distinction—when doing so entails no harm—is obvious from the general principle of opposing their ways, and the Sacred Law may require us to differ from them in such matters.

It may even require them to differ from us, as in matters of dress and the like. Sometimes the ruling remains at simple recommendation, as with dyeing the beard, praying in sandals, and the manner of prostration; at other times it rises to the level of reprehensibility, such as delaying the Maghrib prayer or postponing the breaking of the fast. This is unlike resembling them in practices that were originally borrowed from them, for the default ruling there, as we have already shown, is prohibition.

The first volume ends here—praise be to Allah; the second volume follows.