Issue Eleven: Competitions devoted to memorising the Qur’an, hadith, jurisprudence, and other beneficial sciences, or to answering legal questions—may prize money be placed on them?

Those who forbade it include the companions of Mālik, Aḥmad, and al-Shāfiʿī⦗1⦘.

Those who allowed it are the Ḥanafī scholars⦗2⦗, our own teacher⦗3⦘, and—as Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr reports—even al-Shāfiʿī himself.

Such contests are more deserving of permissibility than net-casting, wrestling, or swimming; thus, whoever permits prize money for those should, with even greater reason, permit it here. Indeed, this mirrors the wager Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq made with the unbelievers of Quraysh regarding the truth of what he had informed them, and we have already noted⦗4⦘ that no sound scriptural evidence proves its abrogation, that Abū Bakr collected their stake after gambling had been forbidden, and that religion stands upon proof and jihād. If wagering on the instruments of jihād is allowed, then doing so for the sake of knowledge is even more fitting.

This is the stronger opinion.

Issue Twelve: Competing with arrows to see who can shoot the farthest, not to