Book of Prayer
First Section: On Recognising the Obligation of Prayer
In the first and broadest sense, prayer is divided into two categories: obligatory and recommended.
A comprehensive treatment of the fundamentals of this act of worship may be gathered under four general headings:
- Knowledge of the obligation of prayer and what relates to it.
- Knowledge of its three sets of conditions—that is, the conditions of obligation, the conditions of validity, and the conditions of completion and perfection.
- Knowledge of the actions and utterances that constitute it, namely its pillars.
- Knowledge of how missed prayers are to be made up and how to rectify and compensate for any deficiency that may occur in them, for making up a prayer is in effect the performance of what was missed.
The first heading itself embraces four issues that form the foundational principles of this chapter:
- A clarification of the fact that prayer is obligatory;
- A clarification of the number of prayers that are obligatory;
- A clarification of those upon whom it is obligatory;
- A statement of what is incumbent upon anyone who deliberately abandons it.
Issue One
The obligation of prayer is plain from the Qur’an, the Sunnah, and the unanimous agreement of the scholars; its widespread notoriety renders any elaborate proof superfluous.
Issue Two
As for the number of obligatory prayers, there are two opinions.
The first, held by Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and the majority, is that only the five daily prayers are obligatory—nothing more.
The second, held by Abū Ḥanīfah and his companions, is that the Witr prayer is obligatory in addition to the five. Their dispute over whether a ruling established by the Sunnah should be labelled “obligatory” (wājib) or “farḍ” is of no practical consequence. The cause of their disagreement lies in the apparently conflicting ḥadīths.
As for the reports whose purport—and indeed whose explicit wording—restricts the obligation to the five prayers alone, they are well known