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Imam al Suyuti addresses this by categorizing interpretation into valid and invalid. Invalid interpretation contradicts established Islamic principles and relies on nothing more than personal whim. Valid interpretation, even when offering a fresh angle, remains firmly grounded in the Quran itself, the statements of the Prophet ﷺ, the understanding of the Companions who witnessed the revelation directly, and the rules of the Arabic language. Readings that meet these criteria are not considered tafseer bi al ra'y (interpretation by mere personal opinion), even if they are new. This is precisely why books of tafseer have accumulated varied explanations over centuries rather than repeating one single fixed reading, with each scholar remaining consistent with their own interpretive framework. What, then, does "the fire" actually represent? If the person lighting the fire is a hypocrite, how did that manifest in the daily life of Madinah? Some scholars held that hypocrites never truly had faith in their hearts to begin with, because once true Iman takes root, it does not leave. Therefore, the "fire" must represent something short of genuine belief, a surface level mimicry of it. Proposed explanations include: * Their public declaration of Islam. * The physical protection and social benefits that came with claiming to be Muslim. * The discord (fitnah) they were actively trying to stir. * A temporary flicker of real faith that was gained and almost immediately lost. * Absolute bewilderment from having never held true light in the first place. This answers the third question: the fire represents one of these states depending on the commentator. As for the fourth question, "their light" refers to whatever measure of guidance or temporary security they briefly enjoyed under each reading. Even through their outward performance of Islam, they gained a temporary sense of light in this life, much like a thief benefiting from the light of someone else's home. The fifth question is particularly fascinating: why does the text use "darknesses" in the plural? Truth is represented as light (nur) in the singular, because it has one ultimate source: Allah's guidance brought through the Prophet ﷺ. Darkness, on the other hand, appears in the plural (zulumat) because it encompasses everything in the absence of that light. Ibn Ashur notes that these darknesses represent the actual layers of disbelief, lying, and mockery the hypocrites were immersed in when dealing with the believers. When read together, the parable captures the exact accusation leveled against the hypocrites at the start of Surah al Baqarah: trading guidance for misguidance. Whether the fire represents a verbal declaration, an outward mimicry, or a brief taste of real faith, the result is identical: light was right there in front of them, and it was lost. That is the real power of the image: not that they were completely cut off from guidance but that they had access to it in some form and let it go.

The One Who Kindled The Fire.... Studying the Quran is one of my genuine passions. The interpretive work of moving between the Arabic text and English translations, and seeing how different scholars navigate those nuances, is what keeps bringing me back to it. Someone recently asked me to explain a verse from Surah al Baqarah: مثَلُهُمْ كَمَثَلِ الَّذِي اسْتَوْقَدَ نَارًا فَلَمَّا أَضَاءَتْ مَا حَوْلَهُ ذَهَبَ اللَّهُ بِنُورِهِمْ وَتَرَكَهُمْ فِي ظُلُمَاتٍ لَّا يُبْصِرُونَ "Their example is like that of one who kindled a fire, but when it illuminated what was around him, Allah took away their light and left them in darknesses they could not see." Rather than answering privately, I wanted to write this out for anyone else who finds this level of study interesting. I am not an expert here and this is not meant to be an exhaustive breakdown; it is simply a student trying to unpack a verse a little further than a standard translation allows. A quick note on why this kind of work is challenging: Arabic words carry structural layers of meaning that do not translate easily. Think about an English idiom like "my foot" used to dismiss something someone just said. Explaining that to someone with no background in English takes real effort, because the literal words give virtually no clue to the actual feeling or intent behind them. Quranic Arabic functions with that same depth, only with far more at stake. That is both the challenge and the reward of tafseer. One important disclaimer before continuing: the foundational message of the Quran, which is recognizing the authority of Allah and His guidance to humanity, does not depend on resolving every fine interpretive detail below. That overarching message is clear on a first reading. What follows is simply a closer look at one specific parable, not a claim that understanding Islam requires all of this technical breakdown. Surah al Baqarah, the longest chapter of the Quran, opens by describing the hypocrites of Madinah: their lying, disbelief, mischief-making, and mockery. To make their condition vivid, the Quran presents a parable. Five questions naturally arise from this image: 1. Who is lighting the fire? 2. Who does "their light" refer to? 3. What does the fire represent? 4. What does the "light" mean here? 5. Why does the text use "darknesses" in the plural? Starting with the first issue: we have a singular figure lighting the fire, followed by a shift to a plural pronoun ("their light"). Why the shift? Most books of tafseer read the parable as describing the hypocrites as a collective group, but grammatically it begins in the singular ("the one who kindled") before moving to the plural ("their light"). Commentators explain this shift in a few ways: * The singular figure represents one specific, representative hypocrite. * The singular figure represents the entire group of hypocrites as a single unified type. * Each individual hypocrite is understood to be lighting his own fire. So who is actually lighting the fire? The majority of commentators say it is the hypocrites themselves. However, Muhammad Abdullah Draz presents a notable minority reading. He argues that the pronouns do not strictly rule out the believers as the ones lighting the fire. On his reading, the verse means that the Messenger ﷺ conveyed the message, resembling someone lighting a fire to illuminate the darkness around him. The phrase "their light" (nuruhum) would then refer to the hypocrites, who refused to benefit from the truth despite the light being lit right before them, driven away by hatred and jealousy as Islam expanded. That answers the first question in two ways: the majority view is that the hypocrites lit it, while Draz's view is that the believers lit it through the Messenger ﷺ. Under both views, "their light" refers to the hypocrites. This raises a broader methodological question worth pausing on: is tafseer strictly limited to what is recorded in early books, or can a scholar propose a fresh reading like the one Draz offers?

According to the Hanafi school, voluntary Nafl prayers are not permitted from after the Asr prayer until Maghrib. Therefore, if a solar eclipse begins before Asr and extends past it, the eclipse prayer, Salah al Kusuf, can be prayed either in congregation or individually and then completed for the obligatory Asr prayer. Once Asr has been prayed, no further Nafl prayer may be offered. Instead, the remaining duration of the eclipse should be spent in dua, dhikr, and seeking forgiveness until the eclipse clears or Maghrib enters. وإن غربت كاسفة أمسك عن الدعاء واشتغل بصلاة المغرب وإن اجتمع الكسوف والجنازة بدأ بالجنازة وإن كسفت في الأوقات المنهى عن الصلاة فيها لم يصل، كذا في الجوهرة النيرة.

How Does a Scholar Balance Time To Answer the People's Questions? One of the most challenging aspects facing the Ulema today is finding the time to answer people's questions daily. I used to find it genuinely stressful. A large part of my day went into reading messages and emails, listening to voicenotes, and replying, usually across several back-and-forths, easily two hours a day, on top of my regular work and commitments. If I said I receive over a dozen enquiries a day, from people I know personally and people I've never met, I wouldn't be exaggerating. Some scholars have inboxes and WhatsApps that stay inundated without even inviting people to ask. Not to mention the pastoral side where many people just want to talk to a scholar, not to find an answer but to get issues they're experiencing off their chest. This is fine only if the scholar is trained in being able to handle the emotional baggage they have to carry as a result. This is something I've written about in a post on burnout of scholars. Then my dear friend Ahsan Al-Haadee gifted me a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport, and I can't stress enough how useful it was. There's a case in there about a university lecturer who only replied to emails with a very specific subject and wording, anything outside that he simply didn't entertain and who kept a single fixed slot each week for answering emails, never before it and never after. As a result he was able to work at a much deeper level and produced a dozen papers a year. That kind of model can frustrate people who expect scholars to answer immediately. I've had people go on a rant when I replied after several days. I understand where they're coming from, especially if it's a serious medical issue or family dispute needing a swift response. But not every question can be answered quickly even when it's demanded, since giving a proper fatwa often requires real deliberation and investigation. It's reported that Sayyidina Umar (r.a.) would sometimes spend weeks pondering a question before answering it. Scholars should definitely give time to the public for genuine issues but not to the point of burnout or at the cost of everything else in their lives. That's especially true when a question demands hours of research, consultation with senior scholars, or reading through pages of a contract to check a clause. A few models are already in use, and a few more are worth considering alongside them. Some scholars run free live Q&A sessions, where people can attend and ask directly, with the scholar answering what they can in the time available. Others run a paid subscription service, where the public pays monthly and gets their questions answered within a set turnaround by qualified scholars. Where people aren't comfortable paying, the better model is a mosque-run waqf fund that supports scholars financially so they can set aside fixed hours purely for answering the public without it competing against their income. There's real precedent here too, the Khulafa were paid for their duties and paid those who taught the Ummah. I'll leave the wider debate on charging for religious teaching for another time. In the long run, though, none of this replaces the real solution and that's having more male and female scholars trained up to meet the scale of what the Ummah is actually asking for. What other options have you seen work? You can comment here https://tellonym.me/Liaquat/hnest

Question four shows the intention framework at work most clearly. The Hanafi approach doesn't count days accumulated by drift. It asks whether the person formed a single, decisive intention (jazm) at one point to stay fifteen days. Someone who kept extending "a few more days" one stretch at a time never formed that intention, so under the classical reasoning they would keep shortening their prayers throughout, regardless of how long they actually ended up staying. Someone who, on day one, decided firmly to stay a month would lose the dispensation from that moment. This is worked through here as a well-established classical position, not a live dispute, which is worth flagging since not every branch below is settled this cleanly. Two people who spend an identical number of days in the same city can end up with opposite rulings, because the ruling was never really about the days. It was about the moment intention crystallised, or didn't. That's the branch this particular question grew on, and you can trace it straight back to the trunk: the same concept of intention that separates a traveller from a wanderer is doing the work here too, just applied to a harder case. Several of the other questions branch off that same root in their own directions; others, like the flood, draw on a neighbouring root entirely. Seeing which is which is exactly why a student who only reads the later, settled positions without tracing any of them back ends up with a list of disconnected rules to memorise, instead of a small set of principles that generates most of the list. Finally, an interesting discussion raised by some of the later jurists is the issue of having multiple properties scattered across different cities and locations. Does this count as being a resident at multiple points of residence, or does one have to have family there? Unlike question four, this was never resolved cleanly by the early jurists; it became a genuine, live point of contention between later ones, which is why it's left open here rather than answered. How do they define watan asli, and how is it nullified? The aim isn't to hand down a ruling on these questions but to appreciate that navigating differences of opinion like this one, and the rigorous discussion around them, is a large part of what studying fiqh actually involves. https://liaquatzaman.substack.com/p/studying-fiqh-ground-up-and-knowing?r=3002ff&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

For example: the Quran states clearly that a person on a journey may shorten their prayer from four units to two. The practice of the Prophet ﷺ confirms it, he would shorten his prayers on a sufficiently long journey. But neither source says outright whether shortening is obligatory or optional. The Sunnah and the practice of the Companions add that a temporary stop along the way doesn't end the dispensation; someone stopping overnight is still travelling. Yet other reports show prayer being restored to four units on certain occasions of temporary residency. So even the earliest layer of source material leaves real gaps. This still requires due diligence and careful study of the sources to arrive at sound reasoning and an answer; otherwise, obedience to Allah is replaced with ignorance and following one's own preference. This is exactly where fiqh does its work: not inventing rulings from nothing, but building the consistency and underlying logic that lets a jurist answer questions the text never addressed directly. The obvious question that follows: how do we know when someone stops being "on a journey"? Only while in motion? Or still while spending a night or two at a hotel along the way? Working from the positions and narrations of the Companions, the Hanafis settled on a marker: staying in one place for fifteen days or more ends the dispensation, and the person returns to praying Zuhr, Asr, and Isha in full. This temporary base was given the name watan al-iqama. New terms begin to emerge to make the discussions easier to follow. That threshold sounds simple until you start applying it to real situations, and the jurists knew it. Consider: 1. What if the person spends one night elsewhere during those fifteen days, do they still count as a temporary resident? 2. If they stay at several locations within the same town or city, does that count as one place, or does it need to be the same premises? 3. What if they travel in and out of the city repeatedly but return each time, eventually accumulating fifteen nights there? 4. What if they never intended fifteen days at the outset, just a few days, then a few more, then a few more, until the total passed fifteen? 5. What if they never intended to stay at all, but a flood traps them until the water recedes? 6. Can a person hold more than one temporary residence at once? 7. Can a person hold more than one permanent residence? 8. Does a travelling woman who begins praying while menstruating still have the dispensation once she resumes prayer? 9. When does the ruling of shortening prayers actually start? None of these get answered by guesswork. The jurists worked from a framework built by the earliest scholars, proposed answers within it, and debated them there. One load-bearing concept in that framework is intention. Intention is what separates a traveller from someone simply wandering, and it's what separates someone settling at a location for a set number of days from someone merely stranded there or planning to leave the next morning. It's also part of what defines a "location" in the first place, as opposed to treating the whole earth as one undifferentiated place. It isn't the only tool the jurists reach for, question five, the flood, turns on necessity (darura) rather than intention, since someone trapped by rising water hasn't failed to form an intention, they've been prevented from forming one at all, a different category with its own logic. Question eight likely involves how two separate dispensations interact rather than intention as such. Intention is the dominant thread running through several of these branches, not a single master key that unlocks all of them.

Studying Fiqh Ground Up & Knowing That Everything Is Not From Imam Abu Hanifa For those who aren't familiar with fiqh books, they are simply a collection of investigations and discussions that some of the most knowledgeable jurists have carried on for centuries and will keep carrying on. Study any work of fiqh, in my case the Hanafi school, and you notice quickly that the discussions aren't stagnant. The wording of the Quran and the transmitted hadith themselves is fixed; that never changes, but how jurists understood and applied that wording was a live, ongoing conversation. Fiqh is the concentrated effort of the experts working on that conversation, and it develops over time, as and when required, as new scenarios and cases are introduced. The easiest way I've found to picture this is a tree. The trunk doesn't move once it's grown, that's the early reasoning laid down by the founders of the school. But the branches keep splitting, and the further out you go, the more room there is for movement, disagreement, and new growth in directions the trunk never anticipated. But everything grows from that same trunk not grafted from the outside. And the trunk comes from the roots. A student who starts by mapping the trunk first, then works outward, watches the whole tree take shape and can see exactly where each branch left the one before it. A student who starts from a later work is looking at the tree with sections already cropped out of frame, because that particular author, writing centuries after the founders, only preserved what still applied by his time. To that student, everything reads as if it grew straight from the trunk. In simple terms, everything is "from Abu Hanifa." The early reasoning that actually forms the foundation, and the later debate that grew out of it, mix into one another, and a great deal is lost in that mix. None of this is a case against starting with the condensed, later texts, Nur al-Idah and books like it exist for good reason, and most students, at most stages, are better served learning a settled, practical ruling than wading into centuries of khilaf before they can pray correctly. And the settled position in these texts usually isn't arbitrary either; later jurists did real work reconciling and preferring between the earlier disagreements, and in most cases their preference reflects sound tarjih [academic preponderance], not a random branch that happened to survive. The distinction that matters is narrower than "later is worse." It's the difference between learning practical fiqh, which the condensed texts serve well, and being able to actually engage the school's reasoning, defend it, or work through a genuinely new question, which requires seeing why a position was preferred and not only that it was. Knowing the outcome and knowing the reasoning behind the outcome are different kinds of knowledge, and only one of them transfers when the circumstances change. Take the ruling on travellers in the Hanafi school as a case study of exactly this, not because every chapter of fiqh branches this widely, travel happens to be an unusually rich topic, but because a rich example is the clearest place to see the method at work, and the method itself does generalise even where the number of branches doesn't. A student who only studies Nur al-Idah or al-Fiqh al-Muyassar will see all the rulings of the traveller as fixed and expect anyone who discusses the chapter to have the exact same answer. But for someone with a ground-up approach in Hanafi fiqh, ideally under a teacher who can keep the tracing anchored rather than left to unsupervised reading, they see the varying layers of discussion like a timeline. This helps them to understand how to answer unprecedented cases that weren't discussed by anyone before them.

We've seen what happens when that doesn't happen. Slander has circulated for centuries against Imam Abu Hanifa, Bukhari, Ghazali, and Nawawi. Historically, much of it started with sectarian and scholarly rivalry, not laypeople; that's a fair correction to make. But that material didn't stay contained to scholarly circles; it spread because it eventually reached people with no training to weigh it, who took a citation at face value because it looked authentically sourced. That's the compounding risk with a synthesising AI tool specifically: it can hand someone a confident-sounding, well-formatted answer built partly on exactly this kind of disputed material, and the packaging will make it look more appealing than it is. None of this makes AI bad in essence, and it isn't grounds for permanent restriction. Its potential for scholars is genuinely huge, in research, teaching, and producing content, the same way Shamela transformed how quickly a scholar could search and cross-reference a discussion. Every one of the unprecedented matters affecting people's faith throughout the years followed a similar trend: * The writing down of Hadith (once resisted for fear it would displace memorisation and isnad). * Ilm al-Kalam (contained rather than banned). * The translation of Greek philosophy and sciences. (Critiqued and developed) * The translation of the Quran into other languages. (due to the strong possibility of the public reading's intentional or unintentional distortion of Ayahs of the Quran, which later was allowed under supervision and further developed) * The printing press (checks and balances put in place to mitigate the chances of typos and distortions by the publishers) * Orientalism (meticulously studied and carefully critiqued) * The internet (Still being supervised and engaged with even if it is very limited) In every case, the caution came first, then a period where scholars did the work of setting terms, what needed a disclaimer, what needed context, what could be released freely and only then did the technology get absorbed. The lesson from that list isn't that resistance always fails, so don't bother. It's that the technologies that landed safely did so because that middle stage happened, not because it was skipped. That's really the whole argument. Not permanent restriction, not a Ulema class deciding what the public may read, and not blind trust that any tool built with good intentions is automatically safe. Just the same stewardship the Ummah has applied to every major shift in how knowledge moves, done before release this time instead of after. The government also has a role here, it has always been the shield against harms of this scale reaching the public, and where it steps in, that responsibility isn't only on the Ummah. But absent that intervention, the burden of caution falls equally on Muslims to get this right themselves.

The difference isn't access to text; it's what happens after. Shamela retrieves. Ask it for every hadith on a topic, and it hands you a list, exactly what you asked for, nothing more. AI reads across the same corpus and then synthesises an answer, weighing conflicting positions, smoothing over disagreement, sometimes producing a conclusion that reads as settled when the underlying scholarship is anything but. That's not a faster search engine. That's a system performing something that resembles ijtihad, without a teacher, without accountability, and without the humility a real scholar has when a question is genuinely contested. Replicating the mechanics of Ijtihad should never be confused with the genuine human representative of Allah's religion. This kind of tool, however well designed, was never going to deliver an Islamic utopia, no more than atomic power delivered a better world. A layperson doing their own reading and drawing a tentative, sourced view is one thing, they know it's their own reading. A tool that hands you a confident, synthesised answer in the voice of an assistant is a different risk entirely, because it doesn't read like someone's opinion but rather like a result. It reminds me of a statement Imam al-Amash said to Abu Hanifa, r.a. when faced with a question he struggled to answer, Imam Abu Hanifa answered it: يا معشر الفقهاء، أنتم الأطباء ونحن الصيادلة "O jurists! Indeed We are the chemists, and you are truly the Doctors!" Could a well-designed tool instead reduce exactly this problem by citing sources transparently, flagging disputed material, and refusing to adjudicate what it isn't qualified to adjudicate? Genuinely, yes, and that's an argument for building it carefully, not against building it. Nothing here says AI is not harmful. It says an unhuman-reviewed one is a live risk in a way Shamela never was. On the obvious question: who decides what needs that kind of care, and doesn't that just recreate the gatekeeping problem from another angle? Fair point, and it deserves a real answer rather than a wave at "trained scholars" in general. Muslim communities already have infrastructure built for exactly this kind of collective judgment: ifta councils, fiqh academies, and bodies that draw on scholars across schools and regions rather than any single authority. That's the model that should be doing this work, not one institution or one respected name deciding unilaterally what the public sees. It won't be perfectly neutral, no human process is, but a plural, accountable process is a different thing from a single gatekeeper, and the difference matters. It's also fair to ask whether this can even be enforced, given that general-purpose AI already has the same texts with none of these safeguards, and no restriction on a "sanctioned" Islamic tool stops anyone from asking an unrestricted one instead. That's true, and it's a real limit, not a reason to skip the work. Raising the standard on tools built by and for the Muslim community, ones that will carry real trust precisely because they're associated with recognised scholarship, is worth doing even if it can't police every alternative. The alternative to a careful tool isn't no tool; it's an uncareful one filling the same space with less scrutiny. There's also a genuine tension with individual accountability, taklif, worth naming directly rather than brushing it to one side. Every adult is responsible before Allah for their own diligence in seeking sound knowledge, and nothing here overrides that. But knowing the edge of your own competence, and choosing not to render your own verdict on a matter you're not equipped for, is itself the accountable choice, not a suspension of it. That's the same instinct behind not self-prescribing medication past what you understand. Deferring on a genuinely technical question isn't outsourcing your religion. It's part of practising it responsibly.

What should guardrails on Islamic AI tools actually look like? https://liaquatzaman.substack.com/p/what-should-guardrails-on-islamic?r=3002ff&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true I remember the first time I heard about Fiqh, almost three decades ago, chatting with a friend over lunch. I never knew Islam had rulings, principles [Usool], and a methodology governing obedience to Allah, from the leader down to the street cleaner. Before that, I thought an Alim was simply someone who recited Quran and delivered sermons. That conversation is what sent me down the road of studying Fiqh. Ten years later, Mufti Taqi Usmani visited our Ifta class, and one thing he said has stayed with me ever since. He quoted some of the earlier jurists, saying: "إني ألجمت هذا الفقه وأسرجته لكم فأعينوني، فإن الناس قد جعلوني جسرا على النار، فإن المنتهى لغيري، واللعب على ظهري" "I have bridled and saddled this fiqh for you, so help me, for people have made me a bridge over the Fire; the final outcome belongs to someone else, while the toil falls on my back." That is the core of scholarship: accountability, what we know as taqwa of Allah. A real scholar thinks twice before answering a serious question, not only because of the research it demands, but because of how it should be: 1. worded, 2. to whom its addressed, 3. and sometimes whether it should even be answered publicly at all. Ali (r.a.) said: حدثوا الناس بما يعرفون، أتحبون أن يُكذَّب الله ورسوله؟ "Speak to people according to their understanding. Do you want Allah and His Messenger to be accused of lying?" There is a great level of emphasis on how a scholar processes research of others and his own and then presents it to the public. Before going further, it's worth being precise about what this argument is and isn't. Islam has no clergy and no ordained priesthood standing between a person and the Quran and Sunnah. Nothing here is arguing for one. What Islam does have is the instruction to refer difficult matters to "ahl al-dhikr", those who have 'authority' or those who are competent in 'extracting' from the people of knowledge, the same way you'd consult a qualified physician rather than diagnose yourself from a symptom checker. That's not gatekeeping by rank; it's deference to demonstrated competence, and the two get confused far too easily in this debate. Sayyidna Ali's (r.a.) question about quoting Allah and His Messenger peace be upon him isn't about who's allowed to read, it's about the fact that how a text is surfaced, to whom, and when, shapes what people take Islam to be. When, on one occasion, he confronted the Khawarij for weaponising Quranic verses against fellow Muslims, he called it: كلمة حق أريد بها الباطل "a word of truth, intended for falsehood." Access to the words was never the issue. What they did with them was. This is why the traditional curriculum, Arabic, Usul al-Fiqh, Usul al-Hadith, deep study of Hadith and Tafseer, the fine detail of fiqh debate under a chain of trained teachers exists to build taqwa-based knowledge, not to produce people who can simply retrieve a quote. Imam Ghazali wrote an entire book, Iljam al-Awamm an Ilm al-Kalam, loosely translated as "Restraining the Common People from the Science of Kalam", on exactly this: some material, in the wrong hands, does more harm than good, not because the material is false but because context is doing half the work of understanding it correctly. So what actually changes with AI, given that websites like Shamela already put the raw texts in everyone's hands decades ago?

It's become very common these days for people to ask for a ruling on a particular business venture or contract deal. My answer is always the same: without knowing the exact terms and conditions, no scholar can give a ruling. Contracts are probably one of the hardest areas of fiqh, given the nature and complexity of certain deals. My advice to students of fiqh who want an in-depth, Islamic understanding of contracts is this: > Study as many texts as you can, from beginner to advanced level, covering every chapter on trade, leasing, and everything that comes with it. > Get a full breakdown of how a typical coffee shop operates: customers buying onsite, online, on credit, in bulk, plus every financial deal happening behind the scenes between the establishment and its suppliers and partners. > Study contemporary books dealing with modern forms of Islamic trade and transactions.

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The Trend of 'Anonymous' Students of Knowledge A new problem has emerged online: students who want to study with scholars while remaining anonymous. Sitting in on an open lesson and benefiting from it has always been fine without anyone checking who you are, that was never the issue. But being counted as someone's student, or receiving their ijaza, is a different relationship, and it has never rested on anonymity. Even when scholars corresponded and gave ijaza by letter across long distances without ever meeting in person, the scholar still knew who they were dealing with. Distance was tolerated; not knowing who was on the other end of it was not. The ijaza system of reliability and competency was built on that, knowing exactly who you took knowledge from, and who you vouched for in return, because study and teaching are chains of accountability, not just chains of information. Take away the names, and you take away what made the chain trustworthy. Recorded lessons are closer to books than to study. A reader has no right to claim they 'studied by' the author of a book, at best they can say they benefited from it. To actually be counted as someone's student, or to qualify under them, requires disclosing who you are. This matters most where the stakes are highest: online figures who evolved from debating others into criticizing scholars and their work outright, without ever producing their qualifications when asked, or having anyone reputable vouch for them. Identity isn't bureaucracy here, it's what separates informed disagreement from anonymous slander. There are legitimate reasons to stay anonymous online: safety, a hostile environment, a convert or a woman in a restrictive country. Staying anonymous to the world is not the same as staying anonymous to the person vouching for you. A student can use a pseudonym publicly and still be fully known to the teacher who is teaching them and answerable to them; what can't happen is the teacher themselves not knowing. What's described here is different from that kind of protective anonymity, it's anonymity used to claim authority, or to attack it, while staying unaccountable to anyone at all. The internet made the world a few fingertips away. I remember, when it first started, being amazed that I could reach world news and games from anywhere, and that unless I told someone, no one would know who I was. Anonymity became available to everyone by default. The cost of that took years to surface. Nameless accounts can now type, slander, backbite, ruin reputations, and destroy lives with no name attached to answer for it. Even when they're later proven wrong, the damage is buried under years of posts and comments, buried deep enough that the person behind the account may not even remember they owe Allah repentance and their victims an apology. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said: عن أبي هريرة: [أتدرون ما المفلِسُ؟ قالوا: المفلِسُ فينا من لا درهمَ له ولا متاعَ. فقال: إنَّ المفلسَ من أمَّتي، يأتي يومَ القيامةِ بصلاةٍ وصيامٍ وزكاةٍ، ويأتي قد شتم هذا، وقذف هذا، وأكل مالَ هذا، وسفك دمَ هذا، وضرب هذا. فيُعطَى هذا من حسناتِه وهذا من حسناتِه. فإن فَنِيَتْ حسناتُه قبل أن يقضيَ ما عليه، أخذ من خطاياهم فطُرِحت عليه ثمَّ طُرِح في النَّارِ] (رواه مسلم) Narrated by Abu Hurairah: "Do you know who the bankrupt is?" They said, "The bankrupt among us is one who has neither money nor goods." He said, "The bankrupt of my nation is the one who comes on the Day of Resurrection with prayer, fasting, and zakah, but who also comes having cursed this one, slandered that one, consumed the wealth of this one, shed the blood of this one, and struck this one. So this one is given from his good deeds, and that one is given from his good deeds. If his good deeds run out before what he owes is settled, their sins are taken and cast upon him, and then he is cast into the Fire." (Muslim) May Allah protect us.

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That is the actual answer to the mermaid question, the Fuqaha weren't claiming mermaids exist any more than they believed the sun might set twice in one evening. These were mental stress-tests, built on the conviction that Allah's religion is complete, meaning there had to be an answer for everything that could conceivably happen until the Day of Judgment, whether that answer came directly from the Quran and Sunnah, or through indirect Ijtihad by reasoning through edge cases like these. None of this means anyone was ever expected to go out and marry a mermaid. It was never meant to work that way. The mermaid isn't the point; she's just the hypothetical tool to get the legal mind running. What actually matters is the legal reasoning the jurist worked through to get there, the exact same way a law student today gets handed an absurd scenario that could never happen in real life, just to test if they can apply a legal principle properly. If you can work out how fundamental doubt over what someone even is affects the conditions of a valid marriage, you've built a framework you can actually use on real, messier cases: 1. disputed lineage, 2. a person whose conversion is questioned, 3. or someone whose identity at birth isn't clear. The scenario was never real. What you walk away with is. That approach made sense in a world where those discussions stayed inside the classroom. It makes far less sense today. In modern times, Islamophobes and critics actively scour these texts for material to condemn Islam, looking for anything that clashes with contemporary law, reads as discriminatory, or simply sounds excessive and heavy-handed out of context. And unlike students in a Darul Uloom generations ago, today's public has direct access to the exact material once confined to a scholar's private library. Classical textbooks, articles, and commentaries are now searchable by anyone, and plenty of people feel it's their duty to upload these snippets on social media, stripped of the framework that made them make sense in the first place. This is exactly why scholar training can no longer stop at classical text analysis alone. Graduates must be trained not only in Aqeeda, Fiqh, Hadith, and Tafsir, but in how to navigate the public when these matters get raised, rather than brushing them aside and hoping people will simply stop asking. The whole "four walls of the classroom" approach worked for centuries because those discussions actually stayed in the classroom. That reality is gone, and pretending it isn't won't bring it back. I hope that writing posts like this, explaining the internal mechanics ourselves before someone else presents them in bad faith, is what modern adaptation actually looks like. Imam Abu Hanifa was once asked why he spent so much time discussing hypothetical cases that had never occurred. He replied: "We train ourselves for calamities before they strike."

Marrying Mermaids in Fiqh? Why are mermaids mentioned in books of Fiqh if there have never been any proven cases of them? Books of Fiqh were never designed to be read off the shelf by people with no prior training in the school and its principles. Without that firm grounding, the text sits completely stripped of context. In fact, an untrained reader will almost certainly supply their own context, misconstruing delicate discussions on matters like marital affairs, trade, Zakat, foreign policy, and military warfare. If someone without training tries to read straight through these classical manuals, they will likely come across discussions resulting in them walking away shocked, alienated, or ready to discard the efforts of the jurists entirely. I lost count of the number of times I heard our teachers say that a particular discussion was meant only for the four walls of the classroom, not for the pulpit of the mosque. That isn't gatekeeping or trying to veil the teachings of Islam from the world. There is a real difference between the normative teachings of Islam that are meant to be practised and known and the underlying mechanics jurists used to arrive at Ijtihadi conclusions in the first place. Think of these complex discussions like a detailed, woven tapestry. It is beautiful and coherent when viewed as a whole. But zoom in on a single thread, and you see something that looks alien, stripped of the beauty of everything tied around it. Classroom discussions deal with every individual stitch and weave, incomprehensible to the untrained eye when pulled out on its own. What our teachers were really telling us is that statements cherry-picked from technical works of Fiqh and Aqeeda cannot be understood by the general public without prior exposure and training. Classroom discussions were designed to flesh out every possible problem a married couple might face, for example. What if a husband turned out to be a woman? What if he pronounced a divorce in his sleep? What if a couple, after fifty years of marriage, children, and grandchildren, discovered they were long-lost siblings? According to many scholars, the subject of discussion didn't even have to be something that had actually happened. It could be a purely hypothetical thinking exercise: 1. What if aquatic human creatures existed, 2. could a person on land marry one? 3. If a pig fossilized and turned into salt, would it now be pure to consume? 4. If the sun set, but then somehow reversed and rose back over the horizon before setting a second time, would a person have to repeat their Maghrib prayer?