then it is a recitation, and if he says, “He said,” it is like the wind.” Al-Darqutni remarked: “Avoid Ibn Jurayj’s tadlis, for it is blameworthy; he practises it only in what he heard from a discredited narrator such as Ibrahim b. Abi Yahya, Musa b. Ubayda and the like.” From these masters’ statements it is plain that any isnad from Ibn Jurayj linked only by the particle ʿan is weak—indeed very weak—and cannot be used for corroboration. His tadlis is so objectionable that, according to Imam Ahmad, he even transmitted fabricated reports. If that is the case when the chain is musnad, how much worse when it is mursal, or rather muʿdal, as in the present report! It is therefore as clear as daylight that Mawlana Mawdudi’s attempt to reinforce Qatadah’s mursal with Ibn Jurayj’s muʿdal report is wholly unfounded according to the principles of hadith criticism and the verdicts of specialists in transmitter evaluation. All of the above would stand even if the report did not clash with the hadith of Asmaʾ bint ʿUmays and with Qatadah’s other narration from ʿAʾishah—yet in fact it does contradict them. In my rejoinder to Mawlana Mawdudi I had declared the cited reports—apart from Asmaʾ’s—defective on account of textual discrepancies among the narrators, over and above the weakness of their isnads. He replied that such discrepancies would matter only if we assumed the texts to represent a single hadith. He said: the case is otherwise; rather, they are four separate hadiths, each independent of the others, as their wording shows. Then he added: “The differences between them are not irreconcilable. It is easy to understand that these hadiths mean a woman is ordinarily allowed to expose only her face and hands, but when some need or excuse arises she may uncover up to half her forearm—so the distinction is simply between the major ʿawra and the lesser ʿawra. What points to this is … =”