Chapter: A Comprehensive Discussion of Vows

1. Whoever vows to fast a particular year must refrain from fasting on the day of Eid al-Fiṭr and on the three days of the Greater Eid (the days of sacrifice). He is under no obligation to make up those days, just as one is not required to make up fasts missed during Ramadan.

2. Some jurists have said that if he did not explicitly intend to forego making them up, then he must do so. The first view, however, is the sounder one, and it is my position.

3. Others have maintained that if he expressly intended to make them up, he must do so; otherwise, he is exempt. This, too, carries no weight, for had he knowingly vowed to fast those prohibited days, nothing would bind him, since fasting them is itself an act of disobedience and there can be no vow to commit a sin. By intending to make them up, he would in effect be vowing to fast the very days that are forbidden. In my estimation, this is closer to the truth than the opinion of those who say that intending to make them up is as though one had vowed an equivalent number of other days.

4. Whoever vows to fast a specific month other than Ramadan and then fails to do so must make it up; no additional expiation is required. If illness prevents him, however, he is not obliged to make it up.

5. The scholars of Medina have transmitted from Mālik that breaking a vowed fast is treated exactly like breaking a voluntary fast.

6. If someone vows to fast an entire year without designating which year, and without stipulating that the months be consecutive, he must fast twelve lunar months. Should he begin in the middle of a month, he completes that month as thirty days. If he wishes to fast the months consecutively—which is preferable—the days of Ramadan do not count toward the vow.

7. Whoever vows to fast a day on which fasting is permissible must fulfil the vow. If the vowed day falls on a date when fasting is prohibited, he does not fast and incurs no expiation or any other penalty.