277 – Zayd ibn Thābit (may Allah be pleased with him) said, “I recited Sūrah al-Najm to the Prophet ﷺ and he did not make a prostration in it.” Agreed upon.⦗1⦘

Points derived from the ḥadīth

1. If the reciter does not prostrate, the listener does not prostrate either.
2. The prostration of recitation is recommended, not obligatory; had it been compulsory, Zayd’s failure to perform it would have been censured. It is possible, of course, that he omitted it for a valid excuse. As mentioned earlier, the three Imams—Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Aḥmad—hold that it is a sunnah. Abū Ḥanīfah considers it wājib (incumbent) but not farḍ; in his school, a wājib is established by a probabilistic proof, whereas a farḍ rests on a definitive proof.
3. This ḥadīth does not support the Shāfiʿī claim that, after the Prophet ﷺ migrated to Madinah, he never prostrated at any of the passages in the final section of the Qur’an (al-mufaṣṣal). The report of Abū Hurayrah—that the Prophet ﷺ prostrated in Sūrah al-Inshiqāq and Sūrah al-ʿAlaq—contradicts that view. Abū Hurayrah did not embrace Islam until six years after the Hijrah, following the Battle of Khaybar, yet he says, “We prostrated with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ at Sūrah al-Inshiqāq and Sūrah al-ʿAlaq.”
   Accordingly, the Prophet’s omission of prostration in this instance cannot be taken as proof of abrogation. He might have left it to show that it is not obligatory, because the reciter himself did not prostrate, or—as was sometimes his practice—he abandoned an action he loved for fear it might later be made compulsory. Many explanations are possible.