her appearance?! A Muslim woman should not have anything of her body visible except this and this.” He then took hold of his sleeves—Bayhaqi’s text reads “his palms,” but the correct wording, as found in the other sources cited, is “his sleeves”—and covered the backs of his hands so that only his fingers could be seen; next he placed his palms against his temples so that nothing remained visible but his face. Al-Bayhaqi comments: “Its chain is weak.” I add: the flaw lies with Ibn Lahiʿah—ʿAbd Allah al-Hadrami, Abu ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Misri, the judge. He was upright and virtuous, but he used to narrate from his notebooks; when they were burned he relied on memory and became confused. Some later scholars declare his hadith fair, others even grade them sound. Al-Haythami includes this report in Majmaʿ al-Zawaʾid, 5/137, citing Tabarani in both al-Kabir and al-Awsat, and remarks: “It contains Ibn Lahiʿah; his hadith is hasan, while the rest of the narrators are those used in the Sahih collections.” There is no doubt that when his reports occur as supporting evidence they do not fall below the level of hasan, and this narration belongs to that category. Al-Bayhaqi further strengthened the tradition from another angle. After quoting the report of ʿAishah and then narrating from Ibn ʿAbbas and others in their exegesis of the verse “except what is apparent thereof” (Q 24:31)—namely that it refers to the face and the hands—he said: “Together with this mursal comes the statement of earlier Companions, may Allah be pleased with them, clarifying what Allah has permitted of outward adornment, so the position becomes strong.” Al-Dhahabi concurred with him in Tahdhib Sunan al-Bayhaqi, 1/38/1. I comment: the Companions he alludes to are ʿAishah, Ibn ʿAbbas, and Ibn ʿUmar, the last of whom explicitly said: “The apparent adornment is the face and the hands.” He added: “We have transmitted the same meaning from ʿAtaʾ b. Abi Rabah and Saʿid b. Jubayr, and it is also the view of al-Awzaʿi.” Ibn Abi Shaybah relates in his Musannaf, 4/283: “Ziyad b. al-Rabiʿ narrated to us, from Salih al-Dahhan, from Jabir b. Zayd, from Ibn ʿAbbas concerning the verse ‘and they should not display their adornment except what is apparent of it’: he said, ‘the hand and the patch of the face.’” The same is reported by Ismaʿil al-Qadi, as found in Nazr Ibn