“…The obligatory prayer is not valid inside the Kaʿbah; only a voluntary prayer may be performed there, and this is the clear position of Aḥmad. As for the Prophet’s ﷺ prayer in the House, it was a supererogatory act, so the obligatory prayer cannot be attached to it. He ﷺ prayed two rakʿahs inside the House and then said, ‘This is the qiblah.’ It appears—Allah knows best—that he made this declaration immediately after praying outside the House in order to clarify that the qiblah one is commanded to face is the whole structure, lest anyone imagine that facing only a part of it would suffice for an obligatory prayer simply because he had performed a voluntary prayer inside. Everyone already knows, in general, that the Kaʿbah is the qiblah, so these words must contain some benefit and reveal something that might be hidden and become a point of confusion. Ibn ʿAbbās narrated this ḥadith and understood this meaning from it, and he is the most knowledgeable of what he heard.”

I say: Ibn ʿAbbās—the very narrator—did not understand the report in the detailed way the Shaykh suggests, namely, that only a voluntary prayer may be offered inside the Kaʿbah while an obligatory one may not. Rather, he denied that the Prophet ﷺ prayed inside the House at all, saying, “He did not pray until he came out of it; when he came out he performed two rakʿahs facing the Kaʿbah and said, ‘This is the qiblah.’” Moreover, he did not hear these words directly from the Prophet ﷺ, as the Shaykh’s wording implies; he received them from Usāmah or another Companion, as mentioned earlier. In that respect, he is no different from others who did not hear the statement firsthand from the Prophet ﷺ.

The Shaykh’s words also imply that in a voluntary prayer it is permissible to face only a portion of the Kaʿbah, whereas in an obligatory prayer one must face the whole of it. Yet I wonder: how can one, in practice, face the entire structure? It is self-evident that someone praying outside the Kaʿbah is in fact facing