can be grasped only by scholars who are free from sectarian bias. For that reason al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar—despite his vast learning and his command of Arabic and its rhetoric—could do nothing more, in replying to Ibn Baṭṭāl, than to say: “She was in a state of iḥrām,” as will be mentioned there.

It is plain to those versed in the law that this answer would be valid only if it were impermissible for a woman in iḥrām to cover her face by letting a cloth hang over it—an opinion that neither Ibn Ḥajar nor any other scholar holds. Hence the reply is unsound. Sensing its weakness, some abandon the hadith’s clear indication that it is permissible for her to uncover her face and instead claim that it contains no evidence for the permissibility of looking at her face, as Shaykh Ibn ʿUthaymīn states in his treatise and others repeat. We say: Yes, such looking is forbidden when there is fear of temptation, and for that very reason she, too, may not look at the face of an unrelated man when there is temptation—so is he therefore required to veil his face from her?

The second hadith—listed as the third in the book (pp. 64–65)—is the report of the woman who said, “Messenger of Allah, I have come to offer myself to you …,” and so on.

I say: It is both laughable and lamentable that Shaykh al-Tuwajirī has inserted this hadith among those he uses to argue that a suitor may look at the face of the woman he wishes to marry, her neck (so he claims), and the ends of her hands (1). And when he replied (p. 219) to