“And Ibn ʿUmar would shear his moustache as a sheep or camel is shorn.”

I say: This is a good chain of transmission; its narrators are trustworthy. There is only minor criticism concerning Maʿqil ibn ʿUbayd Allāh, which is not detrimental, and Muslim transmitted reports from him. For this reason, al-Ḥāfiẓ al-ʿIrāqī made no comment about him in Takhrīj al-Iḥyāʾ (1/141, Beirut edition), as did al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar in Fatḥ al-Bārī (10/347–348), where he attributed it to al-Ṭabarānī and al-Bayhaqī. The hadith also has supporting reports, some of which I have documented in Jilbāb al-Marʾah al-Muslimah (pp. 185–187, Islamic Library edition) and Ādāb al-Zifāf (pp. 209 and 210, Islamic Library edition).

The word sibāl is the plural of sabalah—pronounced sa-ba-lah—and means “moustache,” as stated in al-Nihāyah.

What prompted me to trace the sources of this hadith was that I did not find it in al-Haythamī’s Mawārid al-Ẓamʾān ilā Zawāʾid Ibn Ḥibbān. I therefore thought that he had deliberately omitted it because its original source occurs in the two Ṣaḥīḥs, as you may see in Jilbāb al-Marʾah, or that he had simply overlooked it, as he overlooked many others. Al-Ḥāfiẓ likewise overlooked it when he confined himself to attributing it to al-Ṭabarī and al-Bayhaqī!

Know that this hadith contains a noble Prophetic directive which many of the select among Muslims, let alone the general public, have long overlooked: namely, differing from the Magian disbelievers and others. This is as stated in the hadith reported by al-Bukhārī and Muslim: “The Jews and Christians do not dye their hair, so differ from them.” Hadiths to this effect are very numerous and well known.

What I wish to explain is that the commanded distinction is broader in scope than the prohibited imitation. Imitation means that a Muslim does something done by a disbeliever, even if he does not intend to imitate him, when he is able to refrain from doing it. He is therefore commanded to abandon it. Its ruling differs according to whether the resemblance is pronounced or slight. Distinction, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite: it means that a Muslim does something which the disbeliever does not do, provided that doing so does not constitute