So I say:
First: He claims that the ḥadīth is weak in the technical, scholarly sense, adducing as proof his line, “Indeed, reason itself declares it fabricated.” This claim is manifestly false, as you have already seen from the earlier documentation of the ḥadīth through three separate lines traced back to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, every one of them sound. It is sufficient proof that not a single recognized scholar has ever pronounced the ḥadīth weak as this bold writer has done!
Second: He alleges that the ḥadīth is impossible on rational grounds. This allegation is no less hollow than the first, for it is nothing more than an assertion lacking any supporting evidence—evidence he could not supply except the ignorance that inevitably attends a science no one can ever fully encompass. Do you not hear him saying, “No one has ever said… and had it been true, modern science would have uncovered it…”? Tell me, poor fellow, has modern science encompassed everything there is to know, or do its sober practitioners—unlike some of our own who merely imitate them and grow conceited—confess that the more we learn of the universe and its secrets, the more aware we become of our own ignorance? Matters stand exactly as Allah, blessed and exalted, has said: “And you have not been given of knowledge except a little” (Q 17:85).
As for his remark, “Science decisively establishes the harms of the fly and urges efforts to combat it,” this is an obvious sophistry. We reply that the ḥadīth does not assert the contrary; rather, it addresses an entirely different matter whose remedy science had not yet discovered. When the ḥadīth says, “If a fly falls…,” no one—whether Arab or non-Arab—would ever understand, God forbid, that the Sacred Law extols the fly and discourages combating it, save those whose intellects and powers of comprehension are themselves estranged.
Third: We have already cited contemporary medical findings that the fly carries within its body what they have named a “bacteria-repelling agent” that destroys microbes. Even if this does not precisely correspond to what is