Yusuf al-Asir

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Command, prohibition and capacity

The duty of complying with prohibitions by avoidance, and with commands according to one's capacity; in Abu Hurayra's hadith 'what I forbid you, avoid, and what I command you, do of it what you can' — its occasion, per Ibn Rajab, being the questioner who asked when hajj was imposed 'every year?' until he said it three times and was told 'had I said yes it would have been obligatory and you could not have managed'; Ibn Rajab derives from it the prohibition of asking about what is not needed, of asking out of obstinacy, frivolity or mockery, of asking about what God has hidden from His servants, and of questions on the lawful and unlawful that might draw stricter rulings, noting that licence to ask was for bedouins and delegations, not the residents of Medina; and in Abu Sa'id al-Khudri's hadith — the thirty-fourth — the three grades of changing evil by hand, then tongue, then heart, according to capacity, that being the weakest of faith, corroborated by Ibn Masud's report that whoever struggles against the successors who say what they do not do with hand, tongue or heart is a believer, and beyond the heart there is not a mustard-seed of faith (pp. 218–222, 698–699).

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Command, prohibition and capacity