hadith from the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and yet you declare: ‘By Allah, we shall certainly prevent them!’”
He then shunned his son until the latter died; he never spoke to him again. This shows how profoundly the righteous predecessors revered adherence to the sunnah.

Likewise, ʿAbdullāh ibn Mughafal swore never to speak to his relative because the man practiced al-khadhf, even though the Prophet ﷺ had forbidden it. In the same way, every believer ought to hold the Prophet’s sunnah in the utmost esteem.

Someone might ask, “Does a matter like this really justify cutting ties, when the Prophet ﷺ forbade a believer to shun another for more than three days?”

The answer is that these two Companions—and others who acted similarly—did so as a form of discretionary punishment (taʿzīr). They viewed the boycott as a corrective measure for those two individuals. The basic rule, however, is that when a believer commits a sin and then repents, everything prior to the repentance is forgiven; even unbelievers, if they repent, Allah wipes out their previous sins.

Allah the Exalted says: “Tell those who disbelieve that if they desist, they will be forgiven for what has already passed” (Al-Anfāl 8:38)—meaning every sin committed before repentance.

Nonetheless, these two Companions, may Allah be pleased with them both, wanted to discipline the one who opposed the Prophet’s command—whether through speech or action—even if he did so on the basis of personal reasoning, for Bilāl ibn ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar spoke only from his own ijtihād, yet that does not