Where he had seen him stand

Ibn Umar had a habit his contemporaries found remarkable and later scholars have argued about ever since.

When he travelled a route he had travelled with the Prophet ﷺ, he stopped where the Prophet ﷺ had stopped. He prayed where he had prayed. The reports describe him turning his camel in a particular place because he had seen the Prophet ﷺ turn his camel there, and pouring water on a particular tree because he had seen him do it.

None of that is a ruling. Nobody has ever suggested that the religion requires stopping under a specific tree outside Madinah.

So what was he doing?

The most plausible reading, and the one the sources themselves suggest, is that he did not trust his own judgement about which details were the significant ones. If you have watched someone do something and you are certain the *whole* of it was right, then separating the essential parts from the incidental ones requires you to decide what mattered — and that decision is yours, not his.

Ibn Umar declined to make it. He copied everything and let the question stand.

It is easy to make this sound naive and it is not. It is a considered position about the limits of one's own inference, held by a man who had every opportunity to reason and preferred not to guess. The scholars who came after him mostly did not follow him in it, and mostly said so respectfully.

The same instinct is visible in how he behaved when the community divided: asked to judge between two sides, he declined to judge.