“Say, O disbelievers” (109:1) in the first rakʿah and “Say, He is Allah, the One” (112:1) in the second.
- Ibn al-Qayyim said: The Prophet ﷺ used to perform the sunnah of Fajr with the two sūrahs al-Ikhlāṣ and al-Kāfirūn. Together they encompass the tawḥīd of knowledge and action, the tawḥīd of cognition and will, and the tawḥīd of belief and purpose. Sūrah al-Ikhlāṣ contains the tawḥīd of belief and knowledge—it affirms for the Lord His singularity, which excludes every kind of partnership; His self-sufficiency, which confirms for Him every attribute of perfection; and it negates offspring and parent, as well as any equal, thereby denying all likeness, resemblance, or parity. Thus the sūrah affirms every perfection for Him and negates every deficiency from Him.
These fundamentals comprise the entirety of doctrinal, theoretical tawḥīd, so “Say, He is Allah, the One” purifies its believing reciter from doctrinal polytheism. As for “Say, O disbelievers,” it purifies its reciter from practical, volitional, intentional polytheism. Because knowledge precedes action, “Say, He is Allah, the One” equals one third of the Qur’an, and the aḥādīth affirming this are mutawātir. Practical, volitional polytheism, however, is more prevalent among souls—for they follow their desires, and many commit it despite knowing its harm and falsehood in order to obtain their aims—so the emphasis and repetition found in Sūrah al-Kāfirūn, which seeks to eradicate practical polytheism, exceed what appears in “Say, He is Allah, the One.”
-
Owing to the great importance of these two magnificent sūrahs, and to what they combine of knowledge and action and of the tawḥīd of cognition and intention, the Prophet ﷺ would recite them in the two rakʿahs before Fajr and in the Witr prayer, which are respectively the opening and the close of one’s deeds, so that the beginning of the day would be tawḥīd and the end of the night would be tawḥīd.
-
Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim relates, in the ḥadith of Abu Hurayrah, that the Prophet ﷺ recited the two verses in