convince him of his error, and the soundness of the position I have adopted is borne out by what is recorded in the “Chapter on Prohibition and Permission” of Ibn ʿĀbidīn’s Marginalia (5/242), after he quotes a number of Ḥanafī authorities on tight clothing:
“Accordingly, it is not lawful to look at another person’s ʿawrah when it is beneath a garment that clings to it and reveals its shape.”
He imagines that labelling a view as mistaken amounts to casting suspicion on the one who holds it and that answering him with the words of the scholars is somehow improper.
The other possibility is that he actually agrees with me on the issue but thinks it wrong to proclaim that the Shāfiʿīs erred when they said it is not obligatory, or he supposes that declaring an opinion wrong necessarily means disparaging those who hold it. If that is what he intends—and that, in my judgment, is the more likely case—then it springs from glaring ignorance on his part or from a chilly, misplaced sense of piety. Declaring an ijtihād-based view mistaken does not, of itself, constitute an affront to the mujtahid; only the uninformed imagine otherwise. The one who errs in ijtihād still earns a single reward, as the Messenger ﷺ stated, and in the words of the Almighty: “There is no blame upon you for that in which you have erred” (Q 33:5).
How, then, could a Muslim entertain two mutually exclusive ideas at once—that the one who errs is rewarded, yet simultaneously demeaned? Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr devoted a chapter of his Jāmiʿ Bayān al-ʿIlm wa-Faḍlihi entitled:
“Chapter citing evidence from the sayings of the early generations that disagreement involves right and wrong and therefore obliges the seeker to demand proof, as well as mentioning instances in which they declared one another mistaken and censured one another when they differed.”
I shall now set before the esteemed reader several of the texts Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr quotes in that chapter—abridging the chains of transmission—so that he may judge how little this unjust critic actually knows of the scholars’ pronouncements.