—that is, the sharʿi proofs; if you truly possess them they will spare you all ornamental speech. Otherwise, you will have consigned yourselves to the ranks of the “opinion-mongers,” just as Aḥmad relates in al-ʿIlal (2/246) from Ḥammād ibn Salama, who said: “Abū Ḥanīfa turned his face to the reports and the Sunnah only to repel them with his own opinion.”

Section Four: The khimār and the iʿtijār, and the Almighty’s words, “and let them draw their khimārs over their bosoms.”

We stated earlier in the book (p. 72) that the khimār (head-covering) is a cloth for the head only, not for the face, and I supported this with the words of several scholars such as Ibn al-Athīr and Ibn Kathīr. Shaykh al-Tuwayjirī, however—and with him the partisans of his school and the blind imitators—refused to accept this, insisting that it covers the face as well. He repeated that claim in several places, clinging to a few statements that amount to nothing more than a scholar’s slip or a lapse of the pen—or, at best, an interpretation of intent rather than an explanation of wording, something unfit to be relied upon in a disputed matter. ⦗1⦘

At the same time, he turned away from the decisive proofs in the Quran and Sunnah, and from the statements of the scholars and leading authorities among the exegetes, hadith specialists, jurists, and linguists that contradict him—some of which are actually found in his own book, yet he simply passed over them and concealed what they indicate, sadly enough.

One example is when he cited the verse: “And the elderly women who have no hope of marriage…”