Chapter: The Traveler’s Prayer

A traveler performs two rakʿas, except for Maghrib, which remains three. No one may shorten the prayer unless the journey is undertaken for an act of obedience or at least something permissible, and its length reaches forty-eight miles or more, whether the travel is by land or by sea, in a single outbound or return trip.

Whoever’s outbound or return journey is shorter than that may not shorten. Shortening the prayer while traveling is an emphatically confirmed sunnah, and men and women are identical in this ruling. Over such a distance the traveler is not allowed to pray in full; if he does, then according to Mālik and a number of the scholars of Medina he has acted improperly, and Mālik recommends that he repeat the prayer within its time.

Some Medinan scholars do not oblige him to repeat and hold that he may choose between praying in full or shortened form, yet the first opinion is sounder, God willing, because it is the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, which he never abandoned on any of his journeys.

Whoever completes the prayer out of forgetfulness must make the prostration of forgetfulness. A person becomes a resident by intention, and he is not deemed a traveler unless action and intention converge. He may not begin shortening until he has passed beyond the last houses of the village so that nothing of it remains in front of him.