That line of reasoning which I quoted from the Shāfiʿīs is plainly unsound once you recall that ʿĀʾishah’s statement was itself an answer to someone who had asked her, “How did the Messenger of Allah ﷺ pray in Ramadan?” as mentioned earlier. The prayer being asked about embraces every form of night prayer, so how can it plausibly be limited to Witr alone, to the exclusion of the rest of the night-long worship? Such a reading would imply that the Prophet ﷺ observed two distinct prayers: one, the nightly prayer—whose rakʿah-count we would not know—and the other, a Witr prayer with a full complement of eleven rakʿahs. No scholar versed in the Sunnah would ever claim that. The hadiths are unanimous that his ﷺ night prayer never exceeded eleven rakʿahs, as detailed above. This is simply one of the fruits of twisting the texts in order to shore up a juridical school.

Our stance toward those who differ from us on this and other matters

Having grasped this, let no one imagine that our decision to confine ourselves to the Sunnah concerning the number of Tarāwīḥ rakʿahs, and to deem it impermissible to add to them, means that we declare astray or accuse of innovation those earlier or later scholars who hold a different view. Some people have indeed thought so and used it as a pretext to attack us, supposing that our statement—“Such-and-such a practice is not permissible, or it is an innovation”—necessarily entails that… ⦗41⦘