in adherence to the sunnah—as noted earlier and as will be shown shortly. Al-Nawawi says in al-Adhkar: “It is recommended to combine all of these formulas; but if one limits himself, then to ‘Samiʿa-llahu liman hamidah, Rabbana laka al-hamd,’ and nothing less.” I remark: By this statement he differs from what is regarded as the sounder view in the Shafiʿi school, which holds that prolonging this standing nullifies the prayer, because for them it is a brief pillar. Yet al-Nawawi—may Allah have mercy on him—was no mere follower; like other meticulous and fair-minded scholars he pursues the truth wherever it leads, without partisanship to any faction or fanaticism for any school, following instead whatever of the Prophetic sunnah has been authenticated. In al-Majmuʿ (4/126–127) he records the disagreement on this issue and then cites the hadith of Hudhayfah describing the Prophet’s ﷺ night prayer: the Prophet recited in a single rakʿah al-Baqarah, al-Nisaʾ, and Al ʿImran, then bowed for almost the same length of time as he had stood, said, “Samiʿa-llahu liman hamidah, Rabbana laka al-hamd,” and then stood for a long interval nearly equal to his bowing. Al-Nawawi comments: “This hadith explicitly permits lengthening the post-bow standing with dhikr; it is hard for those who forbid it to answer this, so the stronger view is that lengthening it with dhikr is permissible.” The careful scholar Ibn Daqiq al-ʿId adopts the same position, as will be quoted shortly. (1) This rebuts the claim—advanced by al-Jawhari and others—that the term bidʿ (a few) is confined to numbers below twenty; see Fath al-Bari. (2) That is, they were racing to write it down, each wanting to outstrip the other, aiming to see “which of them would write it first”; the feminine pronoun refers to those words. (3) It is transmitted with the word in the accusative as a circumstantial qualifier, and also with the nominative, construing it as an independent phrase after the construct relationship has been severed.