Answer: If you have travelled from your home town to another town, taken up permanent residence there and abandoned your original town once and for all, then you later travel from your new place of residence to your former town—not in order to resettle there but for some other purpose, merely passing through it along your route—the ruling is as follows:

• If you have a wife who is permanently living there, you must perform the prayers in full, because her settled presence makes you one of the people of that town.

• If you have neither a wife nor any family there and are only passing through before returning to your new place of residence, you shorten the prayer, for you are deemed a traveller—unless you intend to stay for more than four days, in which case you must pray in full because you now have the status of a resident. And Allah, the Exalted, knows best.

Question: If his departure from that town was not final, and he still owns some property or houses there and has relatives whom he visits once or twice a year, does a stay of about four days make him a traveller or a resident?

Answer: If he still has family in that town and a wife—although he says he has no wife—or if he has not left the town permanently but only gone elsewhere temporarily for work and then returns to his usual home and place of settlement, this town remains his place of residence and he may not shorten the prayer there. However, he himself states that he has departed it permanently and settled in another town; that other town has therefore become his place of residence.

But if, on the contrary, his place of residence is his original hometown and he had only gone to