Ruling on visiting shrines and whether the traveller may shorten his prayer
154 – [And]¹ some scholars among them—such as Abū l-Wafāʾ ibn ʿAqīl and others—have stated that a traveller who undertakes a journey solely to visit certain shrines may not shorten the prayer, for his travel is not sinful. Only a group of later jurists² granted the concession for shortening in this kind of journey. The visitation that is legislated, however, is when a person merely passes by a grave or goes to a nearby graveyard, just as the Prophet ﷺ would go out to al-Baqīʿ and as he visited his mother’s grave when he happened upon it during the Expedition of the Conquest.
155 – It is authentically reported in the Ṣaḥīḥ³ that he said: “I asked my Lord for permission to visit my mother’s grave, and He granted it. I then asked Him for permission to seek forgiveness for her, and He did not grant it. So visit the graves, for they remind you of the Hereafter.”
(1) The words placed between brackets are an added phrase that restores the coherence of the passage.
(2) The author, may Allah have mercy on him, writes: “As for someone who travels solely to visit the graves of prophets and the righteous, is he permitted to shorten the prayer? Two well-known opinions exist:
• The first—held by earlier scholars who forbid shortening during a sinful journey, such as Abu Abd Allah Ibn Batta, Abu al-Wafa Ibn Aqil and many other predecessors—is that shortening is not allowed on this kind of journey because it is prohibited. Malik, al-Shafii and Ahmad all maintain that a journey the sharia forbids does not qualify for shortening.
• The second view holds that he may shorten. This is the position of those who allow shortening even in a forbidden journey, such as Abu Hanifa, and of some later scholars from the Shafii and Hanbali traditions who deem travel for visiting the graves of prophets and the righteous permissible, such as Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Abu al-Hasan Ibn Abdus al-Harrani and Abu Muhammad Ibn Qudama al-Maqdisi.”
Majmu al-Fatawa, 27:184–185.
(3) Sahih Muslim, no. 976 (108), narrated from Abu Hurayra.