to the explicit wording of the hadiths that forbid it. And what will make this clearer to fair-minded readers, God willing, is that there are also reports that could be understood as permitting gold for men; yet once the prohibitive texts arrived—some of which we have already mentioned—not a single scholar adopted those earlier narrations. On the contrary, they ruled that the reports in question belong to the period before the ban.1 The very same reasoning applies to the narrations that appear to allow continuous-circle gold jewellery for women: they, too, precede the prohibition. There is no distinction between the two sets of reports; whoever tries to draw one is either inconsistent or simply trifling with the evidence!
Restricting the earlier hadiths to those who fail to pay zakat—and the rebuttal
- Others have replied2 that the threatened punishment in the aforementioned hadiths concerns only those who do not pay the zakat due on such ornaments, not those who do pay it. They base this claim on the hadith of ʿAmr b