(peace and blessings be upon him) was performing the eclipse prayer and began blowing. When he finished, he said, ‘The Fire was brought so close to me that I blew its heat away from my face.’” And does not the report in the Musnad and Abū Dāwūd’s Sunan, from ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Amr, state that “during the solar eclipse prayer, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) blew near the end of his prostration, saying, ‘Uff! Uff! Uff! My Lord, did You not promise me that You would not punish them while I am among them?’”?

Some of our fellow jurists have answered this by interpreting it as something he did before speaking during prayer was prohibited, or something he did out of fear of Allah or of the Fire. They said: “This does not invalidate prayer according to our school, as Ahmad explicitly stated, just as sighing and groaning do not invalidate it in his view.” Both answers, however, are weak.

(As for the first, the eclipse prayer took place towards the end of the Prophet’s life (peace and blessings be upon him), on the day his son Ibrāhīm died. Ibrāhīm’s mother was Māriyah the Copt, whom al-Muqawqis had given to the Prophet after the Prophet sent al-Mughīrah to him. This was after the Treaty of al-Hudaybiyyah, for it was after al-Hudaybiyyah that he sent his envoys to the kings. It is well known, by the consensus of the Muslims, that speaking during prayer had been prohibited before this. Indeed, the majority of scholars rejected the claim that the incident involving Dhū al-Yadayn occurred before speaking during prayer was prohibited, because Abū Hurayrah witnessed it. How, then, could such a claim be made about the eclipse prayer? It has even been said that the solar eclipse occurred after the Farewell Pilgrimage, shortly before his death (peace and blessings be upon him).

As for the explanation that he did so out of fear, the report states that he blew its heat away from his face. This was blowing to ward off something harmful coming from outside, just as someone blows on a lamp to extinguish it