Allah ﷺ said: “Whoever neglects three Friday prayers out of carelessness, Allah will seal his heart.” Al-Tirmidhī said: “This is a good hadith. I asked Muhammad about the name of Abū al-Ja‘d al-Damrī, but he did not know (1) his name. He said: ‘I know of no other hadith that he narrated from the Prophet ﷺ.’”
The Sunan collections also report that the Prophet ﷺ instructed anyone who missed the Friday prayer to give a dinar in charity, or half a dinar if he could not afford one. Abū Dāwūd and al-Nasā’ī (2) narrated this through Qudāma ibn Wabra, from Samura ibn Jundab. However, Ahmad said (3): “Qudāma ibn Wabra is not known.” Yahyā ibn Ma‘īn said: “He is trustworthy” (4). Al-Bukhārī is reported to have said: “His having heard directly from Samura ibn Jundab is not established” (5).
The Muslims unanimously agree that the Friday prayer is an individual obligation, apart from a view attributed to al-Shāfi‘ī that it is a communal obligation. This is a mistaken attribution to him, arising from his statement: “As for the Eid prayer, it is obligatory upon those for whom the Friday prayer is obligatory.” The person who held that view therefore supposed that, since the Eid prayer was