—all, in what they imagine to be an earnest bid to issue the sternest possible warning against so momentous a deed, and out of a supposed desire to forestall any laxity concerning the prayer and its ruling—something that might open the door to negligence toward this great pillar of Islam.

Some of those scholars or their students may cite certain Qur’anic or prophetic proofs that have already been mentioned, or others besides them. Yet they sometimes fail to gather together all the evidences—those that affirm and those that negate the ruling—or they bring them together only incompletely.

In this introduction—and all the more so in the treatise that follows from our Shaykh—I do not intend to exhaustively lay out the proofs advanced by the various sides on this momentous issue, nor to verify the basis of their disagreement and examine it in detail; that belongs elsewhere.⦗1⦘ I shall confine myself here to a few important scholarly cautions that may escape the notice of many students of knowledge. I say:

First: The venerated Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, in his counsel to his pupil, the ḥadith master Musaddad ibn Musarhad,⦗2⦘ said: “Nothing takes a man out of Islam except associating partners with Allah.”