“Indeed, supplication and affliction meet between heaven and earth and wrestle with one another.”
The matter is comparable to an enemy who advances: he is repelled by supplication, by righteous deeds, and by fighting him in jihad. When the cold suddenly sets in, it is warded off by seeking warmth; in the same way, good works and supplication repel harm.
This is a point acknowledged by all religious traditions and by the leading philosophers. Ptolemy himself is reported to have said:
“Know that the clamour of voices in the temples of worship, raised in every tongue, unravels what the revolving spheres have bound together.”
A solar eclipse occurs only when the moon is concealed at the end of its cycle, while a lunar eclipse happens on the nights of the full moon—the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth. Likewise, the new crescent may appear on the thirtieth or the thirty-first night; such is the order Allah has established in the movements of the sun and the moon.
As for the view voiced by some jurists who imagined a concurrence of an eclipse with the ʿEid prayer, none of the Companions ever spoke of this, nor did the majority of scholars—neither Aḥmad nor others. Only a group of jurists from among the followers of al-Shāfiʿī and Aḥmad, and others, mentioned it in deference to a remark by al-Shāfiʿī. When—may Allah be pleased with him—he discussed what should be done if two prayers coincide, he stated that the prayer whose time will expire takes precedence over the one whose time remains. Among the hypothetical cases he cited, solely to illustrate the principle, was the concurrence of the ʿEid prayer and an eclipse; he paid no heed to whether such a situation could actually occur. Jurists often posit many such hypothetical questions to carry analogy to its logical end, without considering whether they will ever arise in practice—indeed, they imagine scenarios that are normally impossible, such as a man having twenty grandmothers or intricate branches of bequests. Later, some jurists clung obstinately to the example, insisting that this concurrence really could occur.