a righteous man died, they would build a mosque over his grave and set up those very images inside it; such people are the worst of Allah’s creatures on the Day of Resurrection.” In this way he linked images and graves together.

Moreover, al-Lat only came to be worshipped because people venerated the grave of a righteous man that stood there.

Later, after mentioning the first cause, he said:

“As for this first cause, its soundness is disputed, for the scholars differ about whether the soil of graves is impure. This belongs to the question of istihālah (purifying transformation), and most Muslim jurists hold that impurity is removed by such transformation. This is the doctrine of Abu Hanifah, the Ẓāhirīs, and one of the two opinions reported from Malik and Ahmad. It is authentically recorded in the Sahih that the Prophet’s Mosque was once a courtyard belonging to Banū Najjār which contained graves of idolaters, date-palms, and ruined buildings. The Prophet ﷺ ordered the palms cut down, the ruins leveled, and the graves exhumed, and he placed the palms in a row along the qiblah side. Had grave-soil been impure, the soil from those idolaters’ graves would also have been impure, and the Prophet ﷺ would have ordered that it be removed, for that soil must inevitably have mixed with the surrounding earth.”

He then mentioned the second cause and said:

“This second cause is unquestionably sound according to them all. Those who argued from the first—such as al-Shāfiʿī and others—also relied on this second one and regarded the practice as reprehensible because of the temptation it involves. All the leading authorities of the schools of Ahmad and Malik, such as Abū Bakr al-Athram, a disciple of Ahmad, and others, likewise cited this second cause, even if some of them additionally used the first.”

Allah the Exalted said: “And they said, ‘Do not abandon your gods; do not abandon Wadd, nor Suwāʿ, nor Yaghūth, Yaʿūq, or Nasr. They have already led many astray.’” [Nūḥ 23–24] Ibn ʿAbbās and others of the early generation said that these were the names of righteous men among the people of Noah. When