to respond, Your Eminence? Is this the scholars’ way? Suppose a critic were to reject your own book—the one in which you refute your opponent—or were to rebut the man who imitated you without knowledge or clear guidance, and then wrote an epistle he entitled “The Essence of the Obligation to Wear the Niqab,” using the very same words you have just employed. Would such a person be right in his refutation, or merely ignorant? The same question applies to that doctor—so they claim—who composed a rejoinder to you, or to your aforementioned imitator, under the title “The Prohibition of the Niqab.”(1) There is no doubt that he committed the same deed as you—sheer obstinacy and pretension. I say this even though I have not read his book; I have only come across a few excerpts that were themselves refuted in the journal al-Tawḥīd, published by the Jamāʿat Anṣār al-Sunnah in Cairo, issue 7, 1411 AH.

What you should have done, Your Eminence, was to be sincere toward your readers: present your opponent’s evidence and counter it with evidence, as the principles of ḥadīth criticism demand—not in the fashion of blind imitators whose behavior is summed up by the proverb, “A goat—even if it flies!”

I suspect the shaykh uttered that feeble remark only because he was unaware of those who had preceded me in declaring the ḥadīth weak and attributing its flaw to Nabahān. Otherwise he would not have allowed himself to say it, for in so doing he strikes at scholars of real stature—even in the eyes of imitators like himself, who have no