without it; and al-Muwaffaq Ibn Qudāmah said, “We know of no one who has obliged a person who prayed alone to repeat the prayer.”
The well-known position within the school is that he may perform the congregation in his own home, though the mosque is preferable.
Yet Ibn al-Qayyim rejected this view and argued that it is obligatory to hold it in the mosque. He said, “Whoever examines the Sunnah with due care will realize that performing it in the mosques is an individual duty, save when an excuse permits one to forgo the congregation; in this way the various hadiths and reports are reconciled.”
Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn [Ibn Taymiyyah] added, “Prayer in the mosques is one of the greatest hallmarks and symbols of the religion; abandoning it erases the outward traces of the prayer.”
Among the proofs adduced by the two shaykhs for its obligation in the mosque is the report in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (654) from Ibn Masʿūd (may Allah be pleased with him):
“Whoever would be pleased to meet Allah tomorrow as a Muslim, let him observe these five prayers where the call to them is made, for Allah has prescribed for your Prophet the paths of guidance, and these prayers are among the paths of guidance. If you were to pray in your houses as this absentee prays in his house, you would be abandoning the Sunnah of your Prophet; and if you abandon the Sunnah of your Prophet you will go astray. In our time none stayed away from it except a manifest hypocrite; indeed a man would be brought, supported between two men, until he was stood in the row.”
The wisdom behind the congregation in the mosques
Allah, exalted is He, has ordained for this Muhammadan community blessed gatherings at appointed times. Some occur every day and night—the obligatory prayers—when the people of a neighbourhood assemble in a single mosque, come to know one another, and grow in mutual affection.
Others are weekly—the Friday prayer—when the inhabitants of a town, or of a large quarter, convene in a central mosque for the same noble purposes.
Still others are annual, such as the two ʿEid prayers, which gather the residents of an entire city in one open place, or bring Muslim delegations from the ends of the earth together at ʿArafah, and in