found in the mursal report—namely the contradiction with the Quran that we have already mentioned. The two reports agree only in the wording attributed to the Prophet ﷺ. One way to see the difference between them is to recall that Ustadh Mawdudi used both as proof that a woman’s entire body is awrah (must be concealed) except for the face and hands before all people, even her father, brother, and the other mahram relatives. That claim is what led me to write my rejoinder, which the publishers were obliged to print alongside his book. In it I remarked that the indication drawn from the mursal report for Mawdudi’s view is no more than a general statement, open to restriction by the well-known qualifying evidences; I cited several of them there. The muʿdal report, however, goes further: it states explicitly that the Prophet disliked ʿAishah’s going out adorned in front of her nephew—an assertion that flatly contradicts the Quran. This element is absent from the mursal report, so the two cannot be treated alike. If you ask, “Can they reinforce each other in the point on which they agree?” the answer is no—even though Ustadh Mawdudi differs with us, saying in his reply to me (p. 11): “Thus each of them is supported by the other.” His claim of mutual reinforcement rests on a principle he articulates in the same reply (p. 4): “It is well known to people of learning—and I am sure it is not hidden from a scholar such as Shaykh Nasir al-Din al-Albani—that when a hadith is weak and stands alone on a given subject, the ruling derived from that subject is weak because of the weakness in the chain. But if several hadiths support it on precisely the same subject, the shared content becomes strong and fit for citation, no matter how weak each individual chain may be.” I say: this principle on which the esteemed author bases his strengthening of the present hadith is manifestly unsound when taken without qualification; the scholars have laid down the condition that it must not