Foundation  /  Al-Arbaʿūn al-Nawawiyya  /  Hadith 5

Whoever innovates in this affair of ours

مَنْ أَحْدَثَ فِي أَمْرِنَا هَذَا مَا لَيْسَ مِنْهُ فَهُوَ رَدٌّ

Man aḥdatha fī amrinā hādhā mā laysa minhu fa-huwa radd. — Wa fī riwāyatin li-Muslim: Man ʿamila ʿamalan laysa ʿalayhi amrunā fa-huwa radd.

“Whoever introduces into this affair of ours something that is not part of it — it is rejected.”

And in a narration recorded by Muslim: “Whoever performs an act that our affair is not upon — it is rejected.”

Translation by Alyph Academy. We translate rather than reprint: the classical Arabic is public domain, published English translations are not.

Reading notes

• The shortest hadith in the collection, and one of the most consequential. Al-Shāfiʿī is reported to have said that this hadith is one half of the religion — hadith 1 governing the inward, this one the outward. That attribution is reported in the commentary tradition; it is not part of the text.
• Radd is a verbal noun used as an adjective. ردّ means rejected — mardūd — and the grammatical form intensifies it. Not merely unrewarded; thrown back.
• “Our affair” is not everything. أمرنا in this construction is understood by the commentators as the religion — worship and the law — rather than every human activity. It is the reason the same scholars who cite this hadith constantly did not treat new tools, new foods, or new institutions as forbidden by it.
• The second wording closes a gap in the first. Read alone, “whoever introduces” could be taken to condemn only the originator. The narration Muslim records — “whoever performs an act that our affair is not upon” — reaches the person who merely follows a practice someone else began. Al-Nawawī prints both for this reason.
• It states a consequence, not a procedure. The hadith says a thing introduced into the religion is rejected. It does not say who decides what counts as introduced, or by what method. That question is the subject of uṣūl al-fiqh, and the schools answer it differently. A hadith of eight words does not settle it, and the disagreements that follow are between people all quoting this text.
• A caution about how it gets used. Because the wording is short and absolute, it is among the most frequently deployed hadith in intra-Muslim argument. Al-Nawawī places it fifth in a collection about foundations, not as a weapon. Reading it as the whole of the discussion, rather than the opening of one, is a misuse of a text about misuse.

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