He also cited the marfuʿ report of ʿUqba ibn ʿAmir: “For me to walk on a live ember, or on the edge of a sword, or to stitch my sandal with my own foot is dearer to me than to walk over the grave of a Muslim. I would not care whether I relieved myself in the middle of the graves or in the middle of the market!” Ibn Majah recorded it with a sound chain. Some scholars offered an eccentric interpretation, claiming that “sitting on a grave” means sitting on it to defecate or urinate. Al-Nawawi judged this explanation weak, even invalid, and Ibn Hazm refuted it from several angles in al-Muhalla (5/136); see his discussion there. Al-Shafiʿi said in al-Umm (p. 246): “I deem it disliked to tread on a grave, or to sit or lean upon it, unless a man can reach the grave of his deceased only by stepping on other graves; that would be a necessity, and I hope he would then be excused, God willing.” I say: If the sole purpose of approaching the grave is to visit it, that is not a necessity which lifts the severe threat mentioned earlier, for the visitation can be fulfilled from a distance; reaching the grave itself is not a condition. For this reason Abu Hanifa said: “A grave is not to be stepped on except out of necessity; it is visited from afar; one must not sit on it, and if he does, it is disliked.” So in Radd al-muhtar (1/846), quoting Khizanat al-fatawa. The plain sense of his word “disliked” is karahat tahrim (prohibitively disliked), for that is what the term denotes when left unqualified, and this accords with the preceding hadiths. Allah knows best. Further details may be found in my Taʿliqat al-jiyad. (1) That is, facing toward it, because such extreme veneration belongs only to the rank of the One worshipped; thus the hadith combines a ban on both belittling and excessive glorification. So al-Manawi in al-Fayd, who adds elsewhere: