Would any Arabic-speaking reader of the hadith—“Al-Faḍl began looking and turning toward her,” and in another wording, “so he kept gazing at her, admiring her beauty”—ever make such a claim? Is that not sheer obstinacy, brandishing two glaring horns?

At other times he explains it away by saying that Al-Faḍl was only looking at her build and stature! And so it goes with other spurious interpretations whose falsity we have exposed elsewhere, together with a number of hadiths they treated in the same manner and which we refuted there.

Sixth: They have conspired to cite weak hadiths and feeble reports—such as the hadith of Ibn ʿAbbās about uncovering one eye—although they know full well the explicit critique on page 88 of the book, where its weakness is demonstrated; indeed, one of them has even declared it weak himself.

The same applies to other hadiths whose weakness I discussed in detail there, most notably the report: “Are you two blind?!” They keep trying to strengthen it, merely imitating al-Tuwayjiri and each other, and then use it to argue that it is forbidden for a woman to look at a man even if he is blind. Yet this hadith is judged weak by verifying hadith specialists such as Imām Aḥmad, al-Bayhaqī, and Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr. Al-Qurṭubī relates that, according to the hadith scholars, it is not authentic, and many Hanbalis—among the Maqdisi scholars and others—have adopted that assessment. This is exactly what the science and principles of hadith dictate, as explained in Irwāʾ al-Ghalīl (6/210).