He explains ⦗25⦘ that ʿUmar abandoned tawassul through the Prophet’s very person ﷺ because, he says, “the report of the blind man never reached ʿUmar; had it reached him, he would certainly have used it.”

Such an answer is invalid for several reasons:

First: the hadith of the blind man indicates nothing more than what ʿUmar’s own practice shows—seeking rain by means of supplication, not by the Prophet’s essence—as has already been stated and will be demonstrated again.

Second: ʿUmar’s tawassul was performed publicly before large crowds that included leading Companions from the Emigrants and the Helpers, among others. If it is conceivable that the hadith escaped ʿUmar, can it also have escaped every Companion present with him?

Third: as mentioned earlier, ʿUmar repeated this form of tawassul whenever a calamity befell the people of Madinah or whenever he was called upon for istisqāʾ. This is borne out by the continuous tense in Anas’s narration—“ʿUmar used, whenever they suffered drought, to seek rain through al-ʿAbbās”—and by the report of Ibn ʿAbbās, recorded by Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr in al-Istīʿāb 3/98. If ignorance of the hadith were conceivable the first time, is it plausible that ʿUmar remained unaware of it every subsequent time he sought rain through al-ʿAbbās, with the Emigrants and the Helpers beside him, silent, never conveying to him the knowledge they supposedly possessed of the hadith of the blind man?

O Allah, this reply would accuse all the Companions of total ignorance of that hadith—or at least of its alleged proof for tawassul through the Prophet’s person. The first claim is manifestly false, while the second is correct: had the Companions believed that the hadith of the blind man sanctioned the claimed form of tawassul