What further supported this understanding for me was the report recorded in the two Sahīh collections from Jarīr ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Bajalī, who said:
“We were sitting with the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, when he looked at the moon on the night of the full moon and said: ‘You will see your Lord just as you see this moon, with none of you deprived of seeing Him. So, if you can avoid being prevented from offering a prayer before sunrise and a prayer before sunset, then do so.’ Then he recited: ‘And glorify your Lord with praise before the rising of the sun and before its setting.’”
This is among the most authentic hadiths on earth, received with acceptance and unanimously acknowledged by hadith scholars and all other adherents of the Sunnah.
I observed that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, informed the believers that they would see their Lord, then followed this with his words:
“So, if you can avoid being prevented from offering a prayer before sunrise and a prayer before sunset, then do so.”
It is well known that when a ruling follows an attribute, or an attribute follows a ruling, linked by the particle fa (“so”), this indicates that the attribute is the cause of the ruling. This is especially so because mere temporal succession is impossible here: seeing Allah is mentioned in the hadith before the exhortation to observe the two prayers, yet that vision occurs in the Hereafter, whereas the exhortation occurs before it, in this world.
By “immediate succession,” grammarians do not mean that the wording of the second item comes after the first, for this occurs with or without fa, and with all the other conjunctions. Rather, they mean that what is expressed second occurs immediately after what is expressed first. Thus, when you say, “Zayd stood up, then ʿAmr,” this conveys that ʿAmr’s actual standing occurred immediately after Zayd’s—not merely that the speaker uttered the second expression immediately after the first. This is well established among jurists in the principles of jurisprudence, and is understood from