that night in its entirety. Since, as we have shown, it does not, the proposed interpretation must therefore be rejected, and the explicit negation remains free of any qualification. Consequently, its indication that spending the whole night in prayer is not prescribed still stands—contrary to what Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hayy maintained in his aforementioned book. That work contains many further points open to objection, but this is not the place to enumerate them.

Let me simply note that the book is marked by excessive laxity in marshalling reports that support the author’s view—whether they are Prophetic traditions or statements halted at the Companions. It is enough to mention that he judged sound the ḥadīth, “My Companions are like the stars; whichever of them you follow you will be guided,” merely echoing some later scholars, without investigating whether their claim accords with reality or with the methodological principles of ḥadīth criticism. Moreover, that grading contradicts the explicit verdicts of the early authorities, as I have demonstrated in Silsilat al-Aḥādīth al-Ḍaʿīfa (52); consult it and your insight into the matter will increase.

69 – “The likeness of the one who upholds the limits set by Allah and the one who violates—or, in another narration, grazes around—them, and the one who condones such violation, is that of people who drew lots for places on a ship at sea. Some obtained the upper deck while others got the lower—another version says: the more rugged lower part. When the passengers in the lower deck needed water they had to pass by those above them, and this annoyed the latter—another narration adds: those below would climb up, draw the water, and pour it on those in the upper deck, so the upper-deck passengers said, ‘We will not let you climb up and disturb us.’ The others said, ‘If we were to bore a hole in our share of the ship we could draw water directly and would not trouble those above us’—another narration continues: ‘and we would not have to pass by our companions and inconvenience them.’ So one of them took an axe and began hacking at the bottom of the vessel…"