livelihood,’ this additional justification has no foundation whatsoever; therefore no legal ruling may be based on it until it is first established—something as difficult as stripping the thorns from a qatād tree.

Such a circumstance is almost nonexistent in our own day, except on the rare occasion of an enormous town packed with inhabitants spread over a wide area—like Madinah once was—where there is only a single mosque that gathers the people, their houses lie far from it because of their sheer number, and the voice of the mu’adhin calling from the mosque’s door does not reach them.

By contrast, in a city that contains many congregational mosques—Damascus, for example—one can scarcely walk a few steps without hearing the Friday adhan from the minarets. On some, or even most, of those minarets loudspeakers have now been installed. Thus the very purpose for which ʿUthmān introduced the extra adhan has been fully achieved: to let the people know that the time for the Friday prayer has arrived, exactly as the aforementioned hadith states. Al-Qurṭubī relates the same point in his Tafsīr (18/100), quoting al-Māwardī:

“As for the first adhan, it is a later practice initiated by ʿUthmān so that the people might prepare to attend the sermon once the city had expanded and its population had grown.”