the One alone entitled to worship, whereas anything else is not entitled to worship at all; indeed, worship offered to anything besides Him is null and void, as the Exalted says: “That is because Allah alone is the Truth, whereas whatever they invoke besides Him is falsehood; and surely Allah is the Most High, the Most Great” (Luqmān 30).

“and that I am the Messenger of Allah,” meaning His envoy whom He has sent to both humankind and jinn and by whom He sealed every prior revelation. Whoever does not believe in him will be among the people of the Fire.

He then said to Muʿādh: “If they respond to you in that”—that is, if they attest that there is no deity but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah—“then inform them that Allah has made five prayers obligatory upon them in every day and night.” These are the noon (ẓuhr), afternoon (ʿaṣr), sunset (maghrib), nightfall (ʿishāʾ), and dawn (fajr) prayers. No other daily prayers are obligatory: the regular supererogatory rakʿahs (sunan rawātib) are not required, the witr is not required, and the forenoon prayer (ḍuḥā) is not required. As for the ʿĪd prayer and the eclipse prayer, the stronger opinion is that they are obligatory, but theirs is a contingent duty linked to their specific occasion.

He continued: “If they obey you in that, then inform them that Allah has prescribed for them a charity to be taken from their wealthy and returned to their poor.” This is the zakāh: a compulsory alms on wealth, taken from the affluent and given to the needy. “The affluent” here means whoever possesses the zakāh-able minimum (niṣāb); it does not refer only to someone with abundant riches. Anyone who holds one niṣāb is deemed affluent, even if that is all he owns. His words “and returned to their poor” mean that it should be distributed among the needy of the same locality, for the destitute of a town have the strongest claim to the charity of its residents.

For this reason, people err when they send their alms to distant lands while in their own land there are