is transmitted as a marfūʿ report; in some versions ʿUthmān is mentioned, while in others he is omitted. Some narrators state: “They used to recite ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.’” Others relate: “They did not recite ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.’” Yet others say: “They did recite it, but not aloud.”

As for the ḥadīths that contradict this, they include the report of Nuʿaym ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Mujammar, who said:

“I prayed behind Abū Hurayrah, and he recited ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful’ before the Mother of the Book and before the sūrah. He proclaimed the takbīr when lowering and when rising, and then said, ‘Among you I am the one whose prayer most closely resembles the prayer of the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him.’”

Another is the ḥadīth of Ibn ʿAbbās: “The Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—would recite aloud ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.’” And there is the ḥadīth of Umm Salamah, in which she said: “The Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—used to recite: ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds.’”

The divergence of these traditions is one of the principal causes of their disagreement over whether to recite ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful’ in prayer.

The second cause, as we have explained, is the question: Is ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful’ an āyah confined to the Mother of the Book, an āyah at the head of every sūrah, or not an āyah at all—neither of the Mother of the Book nor of any sūrah? Whoever holds it to be an āyah of the Mother of the Book deems its recitation obligatory by the same obligation that requires the recitation of the Mother of the Book in prayer. Whoever holds it to be an āyah at the beginning of every sūrah requires that it be recited together with the sūrah. On this matter opinions are many, and each side has room for argument.

Yet among the strangest things said in this debate is their claim that it is disputed whether ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful’ is a Qur’anic verse outside Sūrat al-Naml, or whether it is a Qur’anic verse only within Sūrat al-Naml. They relate—by way of refuting al-Shāfiʿī—that had it been part of the Qur’an outside Sūrat al-Naml, the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—would have made this explicit, since the Qur’an was transmitted by recurrent mass narration. This, they say, is the argument advanced by the Qāḍī against al-Shāfiʿī, and he imagined it to be conclusive.

Abū Ḥāmid, for his part, defended the position by replying that, conversely, if it were not part of the Qur’an, the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—would likewise have been obliged to clarify that. All of this, however, is confusion and lacks coherence, for how can it be permissible regarding one and the same verse to say that it is part of the Qur’an in one place yet not part of the Qur’an in another? Rather, it must be said that ‘In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful’