of their knowledge. Yet those authors even fabricated lies against us in that pamphlet of theirs, alleging that we say the ʿEid prayer is invalid if performed inside mosques!

They wrote: “The reason the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—preferred to pray it in the open prayer-ground was the supposed lack of facilities in Madinah, for there was only one mosque in the city.”

This is sheer ignorance. In the Prophet’s own time, peace and blessings be upon him, Madinah contained many well-known mosques—the most famous being Qubāʾ Mosque, the Mosque of the Two Qiblahs, and the Conquest Mosque. Authentic reports about these mosques abound in the hadith collections. Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar, in Fatḥ al-Bārī (1/445), even mentions several other mosques by name; whoever wishes may consult his work.

Their aim in putting forward this baseless claim is to create a pretext for setting aside the sunnah of performing the ʿEid prayer in the open, by inventing the false notion that “Madinah had no other mosque than his own,” which, so they claim, could not accommodate the worshippers on ʿEid.