and the Successors and the independent Imams who held it permissible. Nor is the statement of Imam Mālik, the Imam of the City of Emigration, likely to have slipped the reader’s mind: he ruled that it is permissible—indeed unobjectionable—for a woman to dine with a man who is not her maḥram (see p. 35), together with other explicit declarations of theirs that the face is not ‘awrah.

I therefore say: in spite of all this, Shaykh al-Tuwayjirī pronounces anyone who holds that view to be misguided, as we have already quoted from him (p. 8); he even counts it among the forms of atheism toward the verses of Allah… (p. 49). Yet he does not blush to claim consensus that a woman’s face is ‘awrah, while he himself relates that most scholars disagree— as noted earlier (p. 32). Regrettably, his followers in this excessive severity are many.

Such is the matter from the academic standpoint, and anyone who has surveyed their statements shares our familiarity with it.

From the practical standpoint, however, the affair is most peculiar, and I have at hand three examples.

First: A brother-in-law of mine told me that he went to visit a worthy shaykh from among those strict brethren, but the shaykh paid him no attention and would not receive him because his wife had left her face uncovered— though her covering was correct in every other respect. This, despite the shaykh’s reputation for humility and fine manners! How does such conduct square with Imam Aḥmad’s earlier dictum (p. 9): “It is not fitting for the jurist to force the people to adopt his own school”? ⦗147⦘