What is the ruling on fasting the Day of Ashura or the Day of Arafah if it falls on a Saturday?

And this is exactly as we say regarding . Some people imagine that if we leave off fasting on a Saturday because it coincides with the Day of Ashura or the Day of Arafah or something similar, we have lost the virtue of fasting one of those two days that happened to fall on a Saturday. No, we have not lost it; we have gained two gains. The first gain is that we submitted, or we submitted our hearts and souls, to the words of our Prophet: . So we followed this hadith, because fasting the Day of Arafah or fasting the Day of Ashura is not obligatory. Rather, the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) excluded the obligatory fast if it falls on a Saturday; it is permissible. As for what is other than the obligatory, we are forbidden from it.
So when we stopped, do you think we lost the fast of the Day of Arafah or the fast of the Day of Ashura? We say: No, we have not. We gained two gains. One gain, which at first glance we do not deserve, and the other gain is clear because we followed the Shari'ah and did not fast. But the other gain is included in something like the saying of the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him): . So we left off fasting the Day of Arafah because it coincided with a Saturday. We did not lose the fast of the Day of Arafah. Why? Because we left it for the sake of Allah, so Allah will compensate us with something better than it. Likewise, it is said, a fortiori, about fasting the Day of Ashura. Also here, when we follow the imam, we did not lose the sunnah of placing the hands or the sunnah of raising the hands with the takbirs. We did not lose it because we followed what is more obligatory for us. . We followed a command, and what did we do here? We lost a sunnah. The reward for the obligatory is far higher than the reward for the sunnah. So we are always and forever winners, no matter how the imam contradicts the Sunnah in our view. I gave a high example just now, which is Ibn Mas'ud. The opinion of Ibn Mas'ud moved to, for example, 'Alqamah, who is the one who narrated the hadith from Ibn Mas'ud that he saw the Messenger of Allah when he entered the prayer raise his hands, then he did not return to it.
'Alqamah, the student of Ibn Mas'ud, led us in prayer as imam and did not raise his hands. We cannot say this is an ignorant man, a man hostile to the Sunnah, and so on, as they say in Sham, "No, a long life brings us to the end of time." This imam lets his hands hang down, why? To spite the Sunnah? No, but rather out of his illusion that the one before him does it this way, so he prays according to the prayer of this imam.
And compare to that all the followers of a school today. So when we follow these imams, we do not follow them, in short, for their own selves and persons, but rather because they represent their preceding imams. So the Hanafi today, certainly, I know that he represents Abu Hanifah, and Abu Hanifah represents Ibn Mas'ud in this particular detail, and there are details by the dozens and hundreds, and so on. So if in some case it becomes clear to us that this imam is stubborn and arrogant after we have clarified the Sunnah to him and established the proof against him, and we are convinced that he understood—he did not understand like many of the common people, he understood completely—but either by his state of being, or by his state of being and he said, he said: . Here, pray your prayer and do not pray his prayer, because he is arrogant. So we do not portray Ibn Mas'ud and those who followed him in his following, so he is likewise. This is what our brother Abu 'Abdullah is pointing to, may Allah reward him with good. But I hope for precision in the matter of who establishes the proof, as came in your first question.

The questioner : They are the students of knowledge.

The Shaykh : The strong ones, yes.