it clears.
The scholars then differed over whether the eclipse prayer may be offered during the times in which prayer is forbidden. The majority held that it is not, relying on the general corpus of ḥadiths that prohibit prayer at those hours.
The Shāfiʿīs, however, affirmed that it may be performed, restricting the prohibition to unrestricted supererogatory prayers. Prayers that have an external cause—such as the eclipse prayer or the greeting of the mosque—do not fall under the ban, for they are singled out by texts that command them and thereby permit occasion-based prayers even during the prohibited times.
This is also a strong report from Imām Aḥmad, selected by Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah and a group of our Ḥanbalī scholars, who qualify the general prohibitions with the narrations that allow prayers having a specific cause. In that way the evidences are reconciled and all of them can be put into practice.
The scholars likewise disagreed over whether the recitation in the eclipse prayer should be audible or silent. The three imams ruled that it is a silent prayer, citing the report in Aḥmad (3268) and Abū Yaʿlā (5/130) from Ibn ʿAbbās who said, “I prayed with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and did not hear a single letter of his recitation.” They also argued that, being a daytime prayer, the default is to keep the voice low.
The Ḥanbalīs, by contrast, regard it as an audible prayer, whether performed by day or by night, based on the ḥadith recorded by al-Bukhārī (1046) and Muslim (901) in which ʿĀʾishah said, “The Prophet ﷺ raised his voice in the recitation of the eclipse prayer.”
As for the narration cited by the majority, it is weak: it contains ʿAbd Allāh ibn Lahīʿah, who has been criticized, and it cannot stand against the report found in the two Ṣaḥīḥs. Moreover, the eclipse prayer is a congregational rite, like the Friday and the two ʿĪd prayers.
Even if, for argument’s sake, it were deemed suitable as evidence, it would be interpreted to mean that the narrator was standing at a distance and therefore did not