about them: “Ask them about the town that was by the sea: when they violated the Sabbath, their fish would come to them openly on their Sabbath day, but on a day when they did not observe the Sabbath the fish would not come to them. Thus We tested them because of the wickedness they used to commit.” (Quran 7:163) The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said about them: “May Allah curse the Jews! When Allah forbade them the fat of animals, they rendered it into grease, then sold it and ate its price.” Agreed upon. For that reason he warned us: “Do not do as the Jews did, turning the prohibitions of Allah into lawful matters by the flimsiest of legal stratagems.” Related by Ibn Batta in his treatise Ibtal al-Hiyal, p. 24, with a good chain according to Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Kathir. Yet none of this has deterred certain people who imitate them, following the whims within themselves—may Allah protect us; see verse 11. A comparable sophistry is the claim of some that hand-drawn pictures are forbidden whereas photographic images are permissible on the ground that they are not human work, the photographer merely “holding the shadow.” So they allege. The immense intellectual effort exerted by the inventor of the camera—enabling him to capture in an instant what could not be produced in hours—counts as nothing to them. Equally dismissed are the photographer’s directing the device toward the subject, inserting what they call the film, developing it afterward, and all the other steps unknown to me; none of this, in their view, is human action. And