of unity, keeping as far away as possible from anything that would splinter the community or fracture its ranks. Thus, for example, among them were those who held that saying the basmalah aloud was prescribed, and others who held it was not; some deemed raising the hands in prayer recommended, while others did not; some considered that touching a woman nullifies ablution, while others denied this. Yet despite all these differences they would all pray together behind one imam, and no one would hesitate to follow him merely because of a juristic divergence.

The imitators, by contrast, are the polar opposite. One of the consequences of their disputes is that Muslims have become divided even in the greatest pillar after the two testimonies of faith—namely the prayer. They refuse to pray together behind a single imam on the pretext that the imam’s prayer is invalid, or at least reprehensible, for anyone who belongs to a different school. We have heard this and witnessed it ourselves, as have many others (1). How could it be otherwise when books of some of the leading schools still current today explicitly declare such a prayer disliked or null? The outcome is that in the main congregational mosque you may see four mihrabs, four imams leading the prayer successively, and people loitering until “their” imam arrives while another imam is already standing in prayer!

The disagreement among certain imitators has even reached matters more serious than this. One example is their prohibition of marriage between a Ḥanafī and a Shāfiʿī. Later a fatwa was issued by a well-known Ḥanafī—nicknamed “Muftī al-Thaqalayn” (Mufti of both realms)—allowing a Ḥanafī man to marry a Shāfiʿī woman, on the grounds that “she is to be treated like a woman of the People of the Book” (2). The understood implication— and the implicit meanings of their books count as evidence for them— is that the reverse is impermissible: a Shāfiʿī man may not marry a Ḥanafī woman, just as a man from the People of the Book may not marry a Muslim woman!