A few days after writing the foregoing, one of my brothers showed me an important book entitled Fath min al-‘Aziz al-Ghaffar bi-Ithbat anna Tarik al-Salah laysa min al-Kuffar (A Conquest from the Almighty, All-Forgiving, Establishing That One Who Abandons Prayer Is Not among the Disbelievers), by ‘Ata ibn ‘Abd al-Latif ibn Ahmad. I was greatly pleased by it, and my pleasure increased when I read it and examined some of its chapters. Its scholarly style and its method of dealing with the various evidences became clear to me. Foremost among these—indeed, the most important of them—is the authentication and sourcing of hadiths, tracing their routes of transmission and corroborating reports, and distinguishing the authentic from the weak. This enables the author thereafter to set aside reports that should not be relied upon because of their weakness, to depend upon those that have been established, and then either to cite them as proof or answer them.

This is what the author—may Allah reward him well—has done, unlike some writers who crowd in everything that supports their view without restricting themselves to what is authentic. This is what the authors who replied to me concerning the question of a woman’s face did—Saudi, Egyptian, and others. As for this brother, ‘Ata, he followed the scholarly method in responding to those who declare the abandoner of prayer an unbeliever. He traced their proofs, mentioning what supported them and what counted against them; then he presented the contrary proofs in the same manner and reconciled them with the opposing evidence in a sound and solid style.

At times, however, this is accompanied by a degree of leniency in declaring reports authentic on the basis of corroborating reports, followed by a strained attempt to reconcile them with the authentic hadiths indicating that one who abandons prayer is not an unbeliever. An example is the hadith of Abu al-Darda concerning prayer: “Whoever abandons it has left the religion.” After discussing it and showing the weakness of its chain of transmission, he returned to strengthen it through its corroborating reports. In reality, these are inadequate corroborating reports and cannot strengthen this hadith. Then, most strangely, he interpreted the departure mentioned in it as a departure that falls short of actual departure! He has other instances of such leniency and interpretation, such as the hadith cited in al-Da‘ifah (6037).

The truth is that his book is highly beneficial in its field. It has gathered everything relevant to the subject, whether affirmative or negative, accepted or rejected, without any apparent partisanship for or against anyone. Its best feature is