They maintained that shortening the prayer is permissible only for one who is in fear, citing the Almighty’s words:

“If you fear that those who disbelieve may attack you” (Qur’an 4:101).

It is reported that this was also ʿĀʾishah’s position, and they argue that the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—shortened his prayers solely because he was in a state of fear.

As for the divergence among those who made hardship the criterion, it springs from the Companions’ own disagreement. The opinion that the minimum distance is four barīd is narrated from Ibn ʿUmar and Ibn ʿAbbās and is transmitted by Mālik, whereas the view that it is three days’ journey is likewise reported from Ibn Masʿūd, ʿUthmān, and others.

The third issue concerns the type of journey in which the prayer may be shortened. Some restricted this concession to journeys undertaken as acts of devotion—such as pilgrimage, ʿumrah, or jihād—and among those who held this view was Aḥmad. Others allowed it in any licit journey but not in a journey of disobedience; this is the position of Mālik and al-Shāfiʿī. Still others deemed it permissible on every journey—whether devotional, licit, or sinful—and that is the opinion of Abū Ḥanīfah, his associates, al-Thawrī, and Abū Thawr.

The root of their disagreement is the tension between the rational meaning or the apparent wording on the one hand and the evidence of the Prophet’s practice on the other. Those who looked to hardship or to the plain sense of the word “journey” drew no distinction between one kind of travel and another. Those who took the Prophet’s actual practice as their guide said that shortening is allowed only in journeys undertaken for devotional ends, declaring, “The Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—never shortened his prayer except while on a devotional journey.” Those who distinguished between lawful and sinful travel did so as a form of stricter censure, the underlying question being whether legal concessions may be granted to those engaged in disobedience. Here the wording appears to clash with the underlying rationale, and for that reason the scholars differed.

The fourth issue is their disagreement about the point at which the traveler begins to shorten the prayer. Mālik states in the Muwaṭṭaʾ that a person who intends to travel does not shorten his prayer until he leaves the houses of the village, nor does he resume praying in full until he enters the first houses on his return. It is also related from him that if the settlement is a congregational town he should not shorten until he is about three miles distant, for that, in his view, is the furthest radius within which the Friday prayer is obligatory for someone outside the city in one of the two reports from him. The majority adopt Mālik’s first opinion.

The reason for this disagreement is the conflict between the linguistic concept and the evidence of practice. Once a person embarks on a journey he is linguistically called a “traveler”; hence, those who consider the lexical meaning say that as soon as he leaves the village houses he may shorten. Those who rely on the Prophet’s practice—peace and blessings be upon him—hold that he does not shorten until he has gone about three miles beyond the village, citing the sound ḥadīth of Anas: “Whenever the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—went out a distance of a mile or three parasangs—Shuʿbah, the reporter, was in doubt—he would pray two rakʿahs.”