at sunrise and at sunset.
Sufyān al-Thawrī maintained that the prayers which may not be offered during these periods are every prayer other than the obligatory one; he drew no distinction between a confirmed Sunnah and a purely voluntary nafila.
From this, three principal opinions emerge:
- All prayers whatsoever are prohibited.
- Everything except the obligatory prayer is prohibited, whether it be a Sunnah or a voluntary nafila.
- Only the unfettered nawāfil are forbidden, whereas the regular Sunnah prayers remain permissible.
Based on the report in which Mālik disallowed the Funeral Prayer at sunset, a fourth opinion appears: voluntary prayers alone are barred after Fajr and after ʿAṣr, but both voluntary and Sunnah prayers are barred at the very moments of sunrise and sunset.
The root of the disagreement lies in how the jurists reconcile the apparently conflicting general statements in the Sunnah and determine which text should restrict which. The Prophet’s statement, “If any of you forgets a prayer, let him perform it when he remembers it,” is general and, on its face, embraces every moment. By contrast, his sayings in the traditions that forbid prayer during these times—“The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) forbade prayer in them”—are likewise general, covering every category of prayer: obligatory, Sunnah, and voluntary. If both sets of texts are taken in their full generality, they clash in the familiar manner of a general text confronting a specific one, whether the specification be by time or by the very name of the prayer.
Thus, whoever chooses specification by time—that is, treating the hours themselves as the exception—pronounces all prayer unlawful during those hours. Whoever chooses specification by category—excluding only those obligatory prayers that are expressly ordered to be made up—declares everything other than the obligatory prayer unlawful in those periods.
Mālik substantiated his view—that the obligatory prayers are exempted from the general term “prayer”—with the Prophet’s words: “Whoever catches one rakʿah of ʿAṣr before the sun sets has caught the ʿAṣr.” For this reason the Kūfan jurists excluded the current day’s ʿAṣr from the prohibited times. They ought, however, to have excluded Fajr as well, in deference to the explicit text about it, rather than dismissing that text with their own reasoning: that one who catches a rakʿah before sunrise thereby enters a forbidden time, whereas one who catches a rakʿah before sunset moves into a permissible time.
The Kūfans, for their part, can reply that this ḥadīth does not establish a blanket exemption for all obligatory prayers from the general term “prayer” to which the prohibition applies during those hours; the day’s ʿAṣr, they argue, is not analogous to the other obligatory prayers. They could have said the same regarding Fajr—had they conceded that it may be made up in a time of prohibition. Thus the dispute ultimately returns to whether the specified exemption mentioned in the wording belongs to the category of a specific ruling intended for a specific case