What is the ruling on hanging curtains on walls, what is the evidence for that, and what did the early scholars (Salaf) say about it?

Hanging curtains on house walls falls into three categories:

First: Forbidden if they are made of silk or contain images of animate beings. Second: Disliked if they are free from the above and are placed for decoration. Third: Permissible if they are placed out of necessity.

Scholars have supported this. Al-Ansari mentioned the dislike of decorating houses with cloths and the prohibition of decorating them with silk and images.

Meanwhile, Al-Nawawi stated that Sheikh Nasr al-Maqdisi prohibited upholstering houses with pictorial cloths and weakened the prohibition of non-pictorial, non-silk ones, and the preferred view is that it is disliked, not forbidden.

As for Al-Mardawi, he mentioned two narrations regarding curtains free of images or those with non-animal images: one is dislike, which is the correct view, and the other is prohibition. He clarified that the difference lies between dislike and prohibition, and that permissibility means validity against prohibition, and that this difference disappears if there is a necessity for curtains, such as heat and cold.