As for the comment made by our Alexandrian brother on al-Sarakhsi’s words, “ʿAli and Ibn ʿAbbas,” which he records (3/420):

He is alluding to what has been narrated from them—may Allah be pleased with them both—in explanation of the Almighty’s statement, “except what is apparent thereof” (Qur’an 24:31), namely that it refers to kohl and the ring. Imam Akmal al-Din Muhammad al-Babarti al-Hanafi has clarified in his Sharh al-ʿInayah ʿala al-Hidayah that their words provide no clear proof for allowing the face and the hands. He states:

“Plainly, the place for kohl is the eye, not the whole face, and the place for a ring is the finger, not the entire hand, whereas what is being asserted is the permissibility of looking at the whole face of an unrelated woman and at both of her hands in their entirety.” End of quote. (10/24)

I say: This annotation and the conclusion drawn from it are mistaken for several reasons:

First: It assumes that the adornment mentioned in the verse is the adornment itself, not its location. This is an error that runs counter to the conclusions reached by the careful exegetes and other scholars—as noted earlier (pp. 27–32). Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the fact that no one claims a woman is forbidden to show her jewellery to a non-mahram when it is not on her body, just as no one claims the converse—that she may display the spots on her body where the jewellery is worn while the jewellery itself is absent.

Second: What further confirms the mistake is that a ring on the finger cannot be seen without seeing the hand; therefore the report clearly intends the place of the adornment, not the adornment itself. ⦗130⦘