Nevertheless, the believer identifies what is right and denounces what is wrong; he is not dissuaded from this by the fact that certain hypocrites outwardly agree with him in commanding that good and forbidding that evil, nor by the opposition of some scholars among the believers. Such matters, and all that resembles them, must be known and put into practice.
The third category (1) comprises occasions that the Sacred Law holds in great esteem: the Day of ʿĀshūrāʾ, the Day of ʿArafah, the two Eid days, the last ten nights (2) of Ramadan, the first ten days of Dhu al-Ḥijjah, the night and day of Friday, the first ten days (3) of Muḥarram, and other such blessed times.
Within this group, people may sometimes introduce practices they suppose to carry special merit, together with attendant acts that in fact become reprehensible innovations requiring censure—such as what some followers of passion have introduced on the Day of ʿĀshūrāʾ: deliberately parching themselves with thirst, adopting displays of grief, gathering in assemblies (4), and the like—innovations for which Allah, His Messenger (Allah bless him and grant him peace), and none of the early generations legislated, neither the Prophet’s Household nor anyone else (5).
Yet because on that day Allah honored the Prophet’s grandson (6)—one of the two chiefs of the youth of Paradise (7)—and a group of his family at the hands of the wicked who