317 – Zayd ibn Arqam (may Allah be pleased with him) reported that the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “ṣalāt al-awwābīn (the prayer of those who ceaselessly return to Allah) is when the young camels’ hooves are scorched by the heat.” Recorded by al-Tirmidhi (1).
Hadith grading:
The report appears in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (748) on the authority of Zayd ibn Arqam, who said that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) declared: “ṣalāt al-awwābīn is when the young camels feel the heat of the mid-morning sun.” The author (may Allah have mercy on him) did not cite Muslim; this was presumably an oversight. Moreover, no scholar besides al-Ḥāfiẓ attributed it to al-Tirmidhi; al-Ṣanʿānī and al-Shawkānī simply followed him.
Vocabulary:
• al-awwābīn: plural of awwāb, “one who repeatedly turns back to Allah” by abandoning sins and carrying out acts of obedience and goodness.
• tarmad (tarmaḍat): with open tā’, silent rā’, and open mīm—i.e., their hoof-pads are burned by the ramḍā’, the intense ground-heat produced when the rising sun strikes the sand.
• al-fiṣāl: plural of fiṣāl, the calf of a she-camel, so named because it has been weaned (fiṣl). Its classical plural is fuṣlān; the form fiṣāl arose when some Arabs treated the word as an adjective (al-Miṣbāḥ).
Points derived from the hadith:
- The time for the Ḍuḥā prayer begins once the sun has climbed a spear’s length above the horizon—shortly after sunrise—and lasts until just before