without an oath. The claim is not heard in this matter, nor in any hadd punishment of Allah the Exalted; because the claimant has no right therein, nor does he possess any authority over it. Therefore, his claim for a right belonging to someone else is not heard from him without that person's permission, nor does he have any authority over it. However, if his claim entails a right of his own, such as if he claims the theft of his property in order to hold the thief liable or to recover what was stolen from him, or if he claims against him that he committed adultery with his slave girl in order to extract her mahr (dower) from him, his claim shall be heard, and the defendant shall be asked to swear for the human right, not for the right of Allah the Exalted.

1916 - Issue: He said: "And if two of the four witnesses testify that he committed adultery with her in this house, and the other two testify that he committed it in another house, then all four are slanderers (qadhfah), and the hadd punishment is upon them."

In summary, it is a condition for the validity of testimony regarding adultery that the four witnesses must agree upon a single act. If they do not agree, the testimony is not completed, and all of them are slanderers and the hadd punishment is upon them. Thus, if two testify that he committed adultery with her in this house, and two testify that he committed it in another house, they have not agreed upon a single act of adultery; because adultery in this house is not the same as adultery in the other. Therefore, their testimony is not completed, and they are punished with the hadd of slander. This is the view of Malik and one of the two views of Al-Shafi'i. Abu Bakr said: "Their testimony is completed, and the one against whom the testimony is given is punished." Abu al-Khattab considered this far-fetched and said: "This is an oversight by the narrator, because it contradicts the fundamentals and the consensus (ijma'). Furthermore, the hadd punishment is averted by doubts; how then can it be made mandatory by them!" Al-Nakha'i, the companions of the school of opinion (Ashab al-Ra'y), Abu Thawr, and Al-Shafi'i in one version said: "There is no hadd punishment upon the witnesses, because they are complete as four, and there is no hadd punishment upon the one testified against, because they did not testify to a single act of adultery for which the hadd is mandatory." Our position is that they did not testify to a single act of adultery, so the hadd is mandatory upon them, just as if two witnesses testified that he committed adultery with one woman, and two others testified that he committed it with a different woman. Moreover, the situation must either be that they testified to a single act of adultery or to two. If it was for a single act—such as if they all specified a single time when it is impossible for him to have committed adultery in both locations—then two of them are certainly liars, and the other two, had they been free from the contradiction of their testimony, would have been slanderers; thus, with the contradiction, they are even more so. If their testimony was regarding two acts, they are slanderers, just as if they had specified in their testimony that he...