The journalist's claim that responding to a sneeze is an ancient custom
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
Question:
The questioner says: I read in the newspaper a statement by a journalist saying that it has become a custom everywhere to say "May Allah have mercy on you" to someone who sneezes, and that this custom dates back to the sixth century CE, and we still utter it.
Answer:
This is an ignorant man. The problem is that he lives among Muslims, yet his ignorance has reached this extent. That is, he has not heard Muslims saying "May Allah have mercy on you" in their gatherings, and perhaps he does not attend the mosques, may Allah forgive me. In the mosques, hadiths are recited, including the hadith about responding to the sneezer when he sneezes. So this man is either extremely ignorant and does not experience what Muslims experience, or he is misguided and deviant, may Allah protect us from that.
The questioner says: I read in the newspaper a statement by a journalist saying that it has become a custom everywhere to say "May Allah have mercy on you" to someone who sneezes, and that this custom dates back to the sixth century CE, and we still utter it.
Answer:
This is an ignorant man. The problem is that he lives among Muslims, yet his ignorance has reached this extent. That is, he has not heard Muslims saying "May Allah have mercy on you" in their gatherings, and perhaps he does not attend the mosques, may Allah forgive me. In the mosques, hadiths are recited, including the hadith about responding to the sneezer when he sneezes. So this man is either extremely ignorant and does not experience what Muslims experience, or he is misguided and deviant, may Allah protect us from that.
Source
التحذير من الغلو في التكفير — islamhouse.com (1:06:13)
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.