its mere existence would no longer signal reprehensibility, nor would its absence imply praiseworthiness. In that case the Prophet’s statement, “Every innovation is misguidance,” would be tantamount to saying, “Every custom is misguidance,” or, “Everything practiced by Arabs and non-Arabs alike is misguidance,” while intending only that whatever of those practices he explicitly forbade is the real misguidance. Such a reading disables the revealed texts; it constitutes a kind of distortion and deviation, not an instance of legitimate interpretation. It entails several harmful consequences:

First: reliance on this ḥadīth collapses. For whatever is known to have been prohibited by a specific text already has its ruling established by that very prohibition, and what is not so known cannot fall under this ḥadīth. The ḥadīth would therefore serve no purpose, even though the Prophet used to recite it in his Friday sermons and counted it among his concise, comprehensive sayings.

Second: both the term “innovation” and the concept it denotes would become empty labels. Basing a ruling on such a word or meaning would be like attaching a legal consequence to a descriptive quality that carries no operative weight.

Third: addressing people in this manner—when the only thing actually meant is the other description, namely that an act is forbidden—conceals what ought to be clarified and clarifies what was not meant by the wording. Innovation and a specific prohibition overlap yet remain distinct: not every innovation is covered by a particular prohibition, and not everything singled out by a particular prohibition is an innovation. To utter one term while intending the other is pure obfuscation, permissible only for someone intent on deception—like saying “the black one” when one means “the horse,” or “the horse” when one means “the black one.”