«وَالْمُرَادُ بِالتَّقْوَى: اجْتِنَابُ الْأَعْمَالِ السَّيِّئَةِ مِنْ شِرْكٍ أَوْ فِسْقٍ أَوْ بِدْعَةٍ»
Piety means avoiding wrongful conduct, including shirk, serious disobedience, or bidʿah.
Muruʾah refers to the dignified conduct relevant to a trustworthy personal reputation. Assessment of uprightness involves the narrator's established character; an impressive academic title or eloquent delivery does not substitute for it.
Important distinction: identifying a particular narrator as engaged in fisq or bidʿah, and evaluating the implications for his reports, belongs to the specialized discipline of narrator criticism. Not every jurisprudential or interpretive disagreement is automatically disqualifying. The point here is to understand the technical requirement, not to issue unexamined verdicts about individual narrators.