five of the twenty while his opponent fails to do so, he is in the lead. If each of them scores five, or if neither of them reaches five, then neither one is ahead.

This, in substance, is the same as offset scoring (muḥāṭṭah).

The legal ruling for this category is identical to the one that preceded it: the archers must finish the round so long as any benefit remains, but completion is not required once that benefit is gone. Thus, whenever both of them have already scored five hits, they are not obliged to continue, and neither is considered in the lead. Likewise, if they have shot sixteen arrows and neither of them has struck the target, they are not required to go on, and neither gains precedence (1), for at most one of them could still land a single hit, and such a margin does not decide the contest.

Section
If they stipulate, under differential scoring, that one of them must secure a net advantage of ten hits out of a hundred arrows, and he achieves those ten within the first fifty, he does not yet merit the lead until the full hundred have been shot. This is one of the two opinions among the Shāfiʿīs (2). Their second view is that he deserves the lead even before the hundred is completed.

The rationale for the first opinion is that the other archer may, during the remaining fifty, score enough to cut his rival’s margin below ten; victory was only to be awarded if he maintained a surplus of ten over