—twenty separate issues, one of which is Issue 16: “Allowing Children into the Mosques.” On page 205 he writes:

“In the hadith: ‘Keep your children and the mentally ill away from your mosques.’ The reason is that a child’s nature is to play; by doing so he distracts the worshippers and may even turn the mosque into a playground, which clashes with the character of the mosque. Therefore he should be kept out.”

I say: This hadith is weak and cannot be used as evidence. A number of leading authorities—ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-Ishbīlī, Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Mundhirī, al-Būṣīrī, al-Haythamī, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, and others—have all declared it weak. Yet its true status escaped Shaykh al-Qāsimī, who on its basis issued a legal ruling that children must be barred from the mosque out of reverence for it. In reality this constitutes an innovation, for it contradicts the practice in the time of the Prophet ﷺ, as detailed in the hadith literature; see our work, The Prophet’s Prayer Described, p. 73, 3rd ed.

The same applies to the first innovation cited above and to others that will be mentioned. Pointing out innovations is an obligation upon the people of knowledge, and