Benefit: Al-Nawawī said in his commentary on Muslim, under the hadith in question: “This explicitly affirms that beasts will be gathered on the Day of Resurrection and restored on that Day, just as legally accountable human beings will be restored, as will children, the insane, and those to whom the call has not reached. The proofs of the Quran and the sunnah concur on this. Allah Most High says: ‘And when the wild beasts are gathered.’ Whenever a term of the Sacred Law occurs, and neither reason nor revelation prevents it from being understood according to its apparent meaning, it must be understood according to its apparent meaning. The scholars said: Gathering and restoration on the Day of Resurrection do not necessarily entail recompense, punishment, or reward. As for retribution being exacted from the horned animal for the hornless one, this is not retribution connected with legal accountability, since they are not legally accountable; rather, it is retribution by requital. Al-jalḥāʾ, with a long final vowel, is the hornless animal. And Allah knows best.”

Ibn al-Malik mentioned something similar, in abridged form, in Mabāriq al-Azhār (2/293). The eminent scholar Shaykh ʿAlī al-Qārī related from him in al-Mirqāt (4/761) that he said: “If it is asked: ‘The sheep is not legally accountable, so how can retribution be exacted from it?’ We reply: Allah Most High does whatever He wills, and He is not questioned about what He does. Its purpose is to inform His servants that rights are not lost; rather, the right of the oppressed will be exacted from the oppressor.”

Al-Qārī said: “This is a sound perspective and a commendable explanation, except that describing the wisdom as ‘the purpose’ is misplaced. In sum, the case indicates, by way of emphatic illustration, the perfection of justice among all those who are legally accountable. For if this is the condition of animals, which lie outside legal accountability, then what of rational beings—the lowly and the noble, the strong and the weak?”

I say: It is regrettable that some scholars of speculative theology reject all these hadiths merely on the basis of opinion. More astonishing still is that the eminent scholar al-Ālūsī should incline to this view. After citing the hadith of Abū Hurayrah from Muslim, and from Aḥmad with the wording of the hadith in question, while explaining the verse, “And when the wild beasts are gathered,” in his exegesis Rūḥ al-Maʿānī (9/306), he said: “Ḥujjat al-Islām al-Ghazālī and a group inclined to the view that none besides the two weighty beings will be gathered, because it is not