the obligation—namely, men.
He – may Allah have mercy on him – then mentioned that Allah ordained for His Prophet ﷺ the sunan of guidance, that is, the pathways that lead to guidance. Everything the Prophet ﷺ brought is guidance and light legislated by Allah for him; and the five daily prayers are indeed among those sunan of guidance. Ibn Masʿūd spoke the truth: in fact, after the two declarations of faith, the five prayers are the greatest of all the sunan of guidance, for the prayer is the foremost pillar of Islam after the testimony that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.
He went on to say, “If you were to pray in your homes the way this absentee prays in his, you would be forsaking the Sunnah of your Prophet; and were you to forsake the Sunnah of your Prophet, you would surely go astray.” In other words, if each person were to offer the prayer in his own house as that absentee did, we would abandon the Sunnah, the mosques would be deserted, people would be cut off from one another, they would neither become acquainted nor grow in mutual affection, and this magnificent outward manifestation of Islam would disappear.
But out of His mercy and wisdom, Allah legislated that His servants pray together in congregation five times every day: you meet your brother, greet him and he greets you, and you all follow a single imam. This is a tremendous blessing, one of the greatest bonds of brotherhood, affection, and love.
He then said, “In our time I saw that no one remained behind from it except a hypocrite.” The hypocrites were many, especially after Islam became strong and honored; in such circumstances a person could not openly declare his disbelief. For that reason hypocrisy did not surface or spread during the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime until after the Muslims had triumphed at the Battle of Badr. Once the Muslims were victorious at Badr in the second year after the Hijrah, hypocrisy began to appear: the disbelievers feared for themselves, so they outwardly professed Islam to the extent that they would come to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ