It was recorded by Muslim from Abu Hurayrah and by Abu Dawud—from him—on the authority of Umm Salamah. Al-Manawi comments: “Ibn Hajar said: the reprehensibility is due to its sound, because it resembles both the tone and the form of a church bell.” I add: In our day various kinds of bells have been devised for useful purposes—for example, the alarm-clock bell that wakes a sleeper, the telephone ring, and the buzzers used in government offices and private houses. Do such devices fall under the hadiths mentioned above or what is analogous to them? My answer is: no, because they do not resemble the church bell in either sound or appearance. Allah knows best. The case is different, however, with the bells in certain large wall-clocks whose tone is identical to that of a church bell. A Muslim should not bring this type of clock into his home, all the more so because some of them play a tune that resembles music just before the bell strikes—like the famous London clock you hear on the radio known as “Big Ben.” Regrettably, these clocks have begun to spread among Muslims, even in their mosques, owing to their ignorance of the Sharia. More than once we have heard an imam reciting during prayer verses that condemn shirk (polytheism) and the Trinity, while the bell above his head rings out, proclaiming and reminding people of the Trinity—yet the imam and his congregation remain heedless. Whenever I entered a mosque containing such a clock, I would disable its bell without harming the mechanism—praise be to Allah, I am a skilled watchmaker. I did this only after delivering a brief talk explaining the Sharia position on such a bell and convincing the worshippers of the need to cleanse the mosque of it. Even so, they sometimes refused, arguing that Shaykh So-and-so and Scholar So-and-so had prayed in the mosque and none of them had objected! That was in Syria. I never imagined that a clock reminding one of shirk would reach the land of tawhid, Saudi Arabia, until I entered Quba Mosque with my brother Munir during the 1382 AH pilgrimage season. To our astonishment we heard the bell of its clock ringing, so we spoke to some of those in charge