especially when it is firmly established that its transmitter—namely Ali—actually did the opposite, as noted earlier: he placed his hands above the navel, not below it. Hanafi legal principles further dictate that a hadith is to be set aside when its narrator acts contrary to it, a rule well known in their usul al-fiqh. Hence they ought to abandon the hadith ascribed to Ali— all the more so because it is weak— and adopt his practice instead; his action is more reliable than the report and is supported by other ahadith in the chapter, as you have seen. The meticulous scholar al-Sindi showed fairness when he wrote in his Hashiyat Ibn Majah, after quoting some of the traditions we have cited (among them the mursal report of Tawus): “Although this report is mursal, a mursal narration is accepted as evidence by everyone. In short, just as it has been authentically established that placing the hands (rather than leaving them hanging) is the sunnah, it is likewise established that their proper place is the chest, nowhere else. As for the hadith, ‘Part of the sunnah is to place one palm over the other in prayer below the navel,’ they all agree it is weak. Ibn al-Humam related this from al-Nawawi and offered no objection.” As for what is found in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Badai al-Fawaid (3/91): “Ahmad— in the narration of al-Muzani— said: ‘It is disliked to put the hands on the chest, because it is reported that the Prophet forbade takfir (placing the hands on the chest).’” This is a remarkable line of argument, for even if the hadith were authentic it contains no prohibition of takfir inside the prayer, and not everything forbidden outside the prayer is likewise forbidden within it; sometimes the reverse is true. We are, for instance, commanded to stand in prayer for Allah, yet we are forbidden to stand for anyone else outside it. It is therefore quite possible that the hadith is merely a prohibition of showing humility to anyone other than Allah, so