was regarded as travel, and we found no greater distance described as travel, we took this as the threshold. He said: “Anyone less than one mile beyond the last houses of his village is subject to the rulings for a non-traveller: he neither shortens his prayers nor breaks his fast. Once he has covered a mile, his journey qualifies him to shorten his prayers and break his fast, and he may do so from that point onward. Likewise, when returning, once he is less than a mile away, he must perform his prayers in full, since he is not on a journey that permits shortening them.”

I say:

These scholars held that travel has a defined limit in the language. They said: “The shortest distance we have heard described as travel is one mile.” The others held that its limit is defined by the revealed law. Both views are weak. The Lawgiver has set no such limit. Nor has anyone reported that the authorities on language said: “What distinguishes travel from something not called travel is a specified distance.” Indeed, defining travel by distance is itself unfounded in both the revealed law and the language.

Moreover, even if travel were defined by a distance of one mile, if this means a mile measured from the boundaries of one’s own village, the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, used to go more than a mile from his place of residence in the Hijāz without shortening his prayers or breaking his fast. If, instead, he means a mile from the whole settled area encompassed by the name of a town, he may be told: “Then his going out to the burial grounds and to relieve himself provides no evidence for your position, because those places were not beyond the outermost boundary of Medina.”

In short, he used to go out to al-‘Awālī and Uhud, just as he went out to the burial grounds and to relieve himself, and some of those places were more than a mile away. The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and his Companions used to go more than a mile outside Medina and come into it from places more than a mile away without shortening their prayers