Ishāq ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Hāni’ al-Naysābūrī said (1): I saw Abū ‘Abd Allāh praying on Fridays until he knew that the sun was nearing its zenith. As it approached, he would refrain from praying until the caller began the call to prayer. Once the call began, he would stand and pray two or four units, ending each pair with the salutation of peace. After performing the obligatory prayer, he would wait in the mosque, then leave and go to one of the mosques near the congregational mosque, where he would pray two units and then sit. Sometimes he would pray four units, then sit, then rise and pray another two. That made six units, in accordance with the hadith of ‘Alī. Sometimes, after those six, he would pray another six, or fewer or more.

Some of his followers took this as a report of his view that there is a Sunnah prayer of two or four units before Friday prayer. Yet this neither explicitly establishes that view nor even appears to indicate it. Ahmad would refrain from praying during the time when prayer is prohibited; once that time had passed, he would rise and continue his voluntary prayers until the imam came out. Sometimes he had time to pray four units, and sometimes only two.

Some of them argued that a Sunnah prayer before Friday prayer is established by what Ibn Mājah narrated in his Sunan (2): Muhammad ibn Yahyā narrated to us; Yazīd ibn ‘Abd Rabbih narrated to us; Baqiyya narrated to us, from Mubashshir ibn ‘Ubayd, from Hajjāj ibn Artāh, from ‘Atiyya al-‘Awfī, from Ibn ‘Abbās, who said:

“The Prophet ﷺ used to pray four units before Friday prayer, without a break between them.”

Ibn Mājah included this report under the heading “Prayer before Friday Prayer.”

This hadith has several grave flaws: