—that former practice.

1. The root cause of idol-worship is venerating the idols, gathering around them, and seeking blessing from them.
2. A person may admire something, imagining that it brings him closer to Allah when in fact it only drives him farther away.
3. A Muslim ought to declare tasbih (subḥān-Allah) and takbīr (Allāhu akbar) whenever he hears words unbefitting the religion or when he is struck by astonishment.
4. The ḥadīth foretells that shirk would occur in this ummah—and indeed it has.
5. This fulfillment is a sign of the Prophet’s ﷺ truthfulness: shirk did appear in his community exactly as he had predicted.
6. There is a prohibition against imitating the people of pre-Islamic ignorance or the Jews and Christians, except in matters for which textual evidence shows they are part of our religion.
7. Legal judgments are based on the underlying realities, not on the names: the Prophet ﷺ treated their request as identical to that of the Children of Israel, paying no heed to the fact that they had called the tree Dhātu Anwāṭ.