in al-Shāfiʿī’s wording in this issue is the fact that, according to his school, the default sense of any phrasing of prohibition is that the act is unlawful, unless proof shows that the wording was intended for some other purpose. He states this expressly in his treatise Jamāʿ al-ʿIlm (p. 125) and to the same effect in the Risāla (p. 43).

Anyone who has studied this question together with its evidences knows that there is absolutely no proof that would shift the prohibition found in some of the previously cited ḥadiths away from impermissibility—especially when other narrations, as noted, emphatically confirm that it is indeed forbidden. For that reason I am certain that prohibition is al-Shāfiʿī’s position, all the more so because he used the word “disliked” immediately after citing the ḥadith: “May Allah curse the Jews and the Christians; they turned the graves of their prophets into places of worship,” as mentioned earlier. It is therefore unsurprising that the ḥadith master al-ʿIrāqī—himself a Shāfiʿī—explicitly ruled that building a mosque over a grave is forbidden, as noted above (p. 38). Allah knows best.

Hence we say: the person who attributed to Imām al-Shāfiʿī the view that it is permissible for a man to marry his daughter conceived through fornication, on the pretext that he merely stated