and he said:
“I know not—nor do I think I shall ever know—
whether the house of Ḥiṣn are men or women.”

Al-Miṣbāḥ states: al-qawm denotes a company of men in which there is no woman; its plural is aqwām. They were given this name because they rise to great and serious tasks.

• yastaḥillūn: they declare lawful the wearing of silk and khazz.

• al-ḥirr: according to the other—and sounder—reading, it refers to a woman’s private part.
Al-Miṣbāḥ notes that the word is read with a kasra and a doubled rāʾ. Ibn al-Athīr records in al-Nihāyah, quoting Abū Mūsā, that the correct form lightens the rāʾ; some harden (double) it, which is unsound. The original root was ḥaraḥ: the final ḥāʾ, the third radical, was dropped, a rāʾ was substituted, and it was assimilated to the second radical. This is confirmed by the diminutive ḥurayḥ and the broken plural aḥrāḥ, for diminutives and broken plurals return a word to its root. The term may also be used continually without such substitution; in that case the final radical was omitted arbitrarily, without phonetic change or compensation.

Shaykh Aḥmad Muḥammad Shākir comments: “This is the authentic wording in all copies of al-Bukhārī and others. Some transmitters render it as al-khazz (with khāʾ and zāy), a type of raw silk; this is a scribal corruption, as al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū Bakr ibn al-ʿArabī pointed out.” ⦗See: Fath al-Bārī 15/52⦘

• al-ḥarīr (silk): i.e., natural silk, a fine filament secreted by the silkworm. Artificial silk, by contrast, is a fibre produced from wood pulp or cotton lint.

• Lessons derived from the ḥadīth:
  1 – The Prophet ﷺ informs us that members of his ummah will commit the grave sin of fornication while considering it permissible.
  2 – He ﷺ also tells us that some men of his ummah will wear silk, deeming it lawful and sanctioning fornication. What he ﷺ foretold has already occurred: legal systems of countries that claim to be Islamic allow fornication, designate for it markets and special venues, and even levy fees upon it—