if they have a force to which they can retreat.

Abū Hanīfa permitted this, while al-Shāfi‘ī prohibited it; the latter is also the well-known position within Ahmad’s school. Another view within his school permits pursuing their retreating fighters at the outset of the fighting.

If, however, they have no such force, their captives are not to be killed, nor their wounded finished off. Sa‘īd and others narrated that Marwān ibn al-Hakam said: “On the day of the Battle of the Camel, a herald went out on ‘Alī’s behalf, proclaiming: ‘No retreating fighter is to be killed, nor any wounded man finished off. Whoever closes his door is safe, and whoever lays down his weapons is safe.’”

Someone following this approach might mistakenly suppose that these Tatars are rebels acting on an interpretive judgment and should be subject to these same rulings, just as some have included those who withheld zakat and the Khawārij under this ruling. We shall explain the error of this supposition, if Allah Most High wills.

The second approach is that fighting those who withhold zakat, the Khawārij, and others like them is not the same as fighting the participants in the Battles of the Camel and Siffīn. This is the position explicitly transmitted from the majority of the early imams, and it is what they mention when setting out the creed of Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamā‘ah. It is the position of the scholars of Medina, such as Mālik and others, and of the imams of hadith, such as Ahmad and others. They explicitly distinguished between the two in several places, even regarding property. Some of them permitted taking the property of the Khawārij as spoils. In the report transmitted by Abū Tālib, Ahmad gave an explicit ruling concerning some Harūriyya who held a share in a village and then went out