as well as Saʿīd ibn Jubayr and Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī.

The third opinion takes account of whether one can actually hear the sermon. If he hears it, he must remain silent; if he does not hear it, he may glorify Allah or discuss some point of knowledge. This was the view of Aḥmad, ʿAṭāʾ and a group of scholars. The majority, however, hold that should a person speak during the sermon his Friday prayer is not thereby invalidated.

It is related from Ibn Wahb that he said, “Whoever engages in idle talk, his prayer becomes the four-rakʿah Ẓuhr.” The majority declared listening obligatory because of the ḥadīth of Abū Hurayrah in which the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—said:

“If, while the imām is delivering the sermon, you say to your companion, ‘Be quiet,’ you have engaged in idle talk.”

As for those who did not regard attentive silence as obligatory, I know of no argument for them save that they may consider this command to be offset by the implicit meaning of the verse:

When the Qur’an is recited, listen to it and pay heed, that you may receive mercy (al-Aʿrāf 7:204),

namely, that silence is required only for the Qur’an itself. This argument is weak—Allah knows best—and it is more likely that the ḥadīth simply had not reached them.

Their disagreement over returning greetings and responding to a sneeze arises from the clash between the general command to do both of those acts and the general command to remain silent, along with the possibility that each command might be an exception to the other. Thus, whoever treated the injunction to greet and to bless the sneezer as an exception to the general order of silence on Friday allowed both acts. Whoever treated the order of silence during the sermon as an exception to the general duty of greeting and tashmīt disallowed them. And whoever made a distinction exempted returning the greeting from the prohibition of speech during the sermon but exempted tashmīt from the general command to respond to a sneeze.

Each scholar adopted one or another of these exceptions according to what seemed to him the stronger or weaker of the two general texts. The command to remain silent is general with respect to speech but specific to a particular time, whereas the command to return greetings and respond to a sneeze is general with respect to time but specific to a particular type of speech. Hence, whoever excluded the specific time from the prohibition of speech disallowed greeting and tashmīt during the sermon, whereas whoever excluded this specific speech from the general prohibition of talking permitted them.

The sounder view is that neither of the two general commands should be restricted by one of the two specific texts without evidence. If no such evidence is available, one must weigh the relative strength of the general and specific texts and the emphasis each command carries. Detailing this would be lengthy, but in brief: if the commands are equal in force, and their generalities and specificities are likewise equal, and there is no proof indicating which ought to be excepted from which, a conflict necessarily arises—though this is rare. Otherwise, preference is determined by weighing the relevant general and specific texts that occur in similar cases