—that Tha‘labi, in his commentary on the surah al-Araf, reports from the judge al-Tanukhi that he said about the verse, “Adorn yourselves at every mosque” (7:31): the adornment meant is raising the hands in the prayer! Such is one extreme, just as the previous claim was the opposite extreme. Questions of this sort gave rise to serious strife between the Hanafis and the Shafi‘is, to the point that both camps coined the famous maxim: “Prayer behind someone of another madhhab is disliked.” In our own school this “dislike” amounts to outright prohibition, and the traces of that principle are still visible in our mosques: you find four separate mihrabs, some people praying behind the appointed imam while others wait for an imam of their own school. On one occasion I said to one of these: “Come to the prayer; the iqama has been given.” He answered, “It has not been given for us; it is for the Shafi‘is!” Thus they contradict the Prophet’s clear statement: “When the iqama is pronounced, there is no prayer except the one being established,” related by Muslim and others; Ahmad narrates: “except the prayer for which the iqama has been pronounced.” A zealot, however, finds no difficulty in twisting the meaning of the hadith—just as he twisted the earlier verse—claiming that “when the iqama is pronounced” means “when the complete prayer is pronounced,” and that because the Shafi‘i prayer is deficient in reward the hadith does not apply to us, so we are safe from contravening it. Such are the assertions of some, driven by the previously mentioned maxim and imagining it to be unanimously accepted among the Hanafis, for disagreement is seldom—indeed never—seen. For this reason I wish to cite statements from our own leading scholars that contradict this supposed principle. In the journal Nur al-Islam, vol. 6 of the first year, p. 388, it is recorded: