circuits … He then related the rest of the hadith. He said (1): “We found no explicit statement specifying the number of passages in which one should jog between al-Safā and al-Marwah, but it is agreed upon.” These are his exact words.

I say: What is agreed upon is running along the valley floor during every passage. As for jogging only during the first three, no one else, to our knowledge, has said or reported this. I asked our teacher about it, and he said: “This is one of his mistakes; he never performed Hajj, may Allah have mercy on him.”

A similar mistake was made by those who said (2) that he traversed between them fourteen times, counting (3) the outward and return journeys as a single passage. This is an erroneous claim about him (peace and blessings be upon him): no one reported it from him (4), nor did any of the imams whose opinions are well known (5) hold this view, although some later adherents of the imams adopted it (6).

One indication that this view is false is that there is no disagreement that he (peace and blessings be upon him) concluded his passage between them at al-Marwah. Had the outward and return journeys counted as a single passage, he would necessarily have finished at al-Safā.