“Let them come out without wearing perfume, keep apart from the men, and let the menstruating women avoid the prayer-area.” Umm ʿAṭiyya (may Allah be pleased with her) said, “We used to be ordered to go out on the day of ʿEid, so much so that the young maiden would be brought out from her seclusion and even the menstruating women would come out. They would stand behind the people, join them in the takbīr, and make supplication with their supplication, hoping for the blessing and the purity of that day.”

Going out for the ʿEid prayer and performing it in this publicly witnessed manner displays one of Islam’s emblems, for it is among the manifest rites of the religion. The first ʿEid prayer the Prophet ﷺ performed was the Prayer of Breaking the Fast in the second year after the Hijrah, and he ﷺ continued to observe it unfailingly until he left this world, may Allah’s blessings and peace be upon him. The Muslims after him have kept it up generation after generation; therefore, if the inhabitants of a town possessed all the conditions for it yet abandoned it altogether, the ruler would fight them, because it is an outward symbol of the faith—like the call to prayer.

The ʿEid prayer should be offered in an open space near the town, for the Prophet ﷺ used to pray both ʿEids at the musallā on the outskirts of Madinah. Abu Saʿīd reported: “The Prophet ﷺ would go out on the day of Fitr and the day of Adḥā to the musallā,” and the report is agreed upon.