Indeed, what drove him to wade into a field he does not master was nothing but the desire to appear in the guise of a meticulous researcher who has produced what the earlier scholars could not—namely, to hand the hard-liners a new weapon with which to nullify the evidentiary force of the authentic hadith of the Khathʿamite woman that establishes the permissibility of uncovering the face. He admitted at the very outset of his paper that it affirms revealing the face, in opposition to Shaykh al-Tuwayjiri and his imitators, yet he justified her uncovering by claiming that it “was only so a prospective suitor could look,” as he states (p. 37), and he repeats this in two other places (pp. 38 and 40).

It may therefore be said to him: you have fallen prey to the obsession with forced interpretation and the suspension of explicit proofs contained in the sound, agreed-upon hadith by relying on this spurious addition. That addition does not say that the Prophet ﷺ was himself a suitor; it merely records that she was presented to him in the hope that he might marry her. Even if it were authentic, it would stand on the same footing as the hadith of the woman who offered herself to the Prophet ﷺ—a report that al-Tuwayjiri likewise construed as referring to a suitor, though no suitor is mentioned, as has already been clarified in the rebuttal to him under “Section Six: Disabling the Authentic Hadiths That Contradict Them” (p. 41). Consult it, for it is important.

Furthermore, even if we concede al-Sindī’s claim, that does not imply that the incident of the Bedouin’s daughter is identical to that of the Khathʿamite woman; the latter is certainly distinct. This was the inclination of al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn al-Qaṭṭān in his book al-Naẓar fī Aḥkām al-Naẓar (52/1-2), because the narrative context of each differs, leaving the Khathʿamite report untouched by that destructive interpretation. [62]