[Commentary]

The author—may Allah have mercy on him—states in his book Riyadh al-Salihin, under the chapter entitled “At-Tatayyur (Superstitious Omens)”:

At-tatayyur is to feel ill-omened because of something one sees or hears, or because of a certain time or place. In short, it is for a person to become pessimistic about a matter. It received the name tatayyur (literally “bird-omen”) because the pre-Islamic Arabs used to seek omens from birds, and the term then came to be applied to every form of pessimistic superstition.

Some of those Arabs took omens from birds. They would scare a bird so that it flew away: if it flew to the left, they considered it a bad sign; if it returned toward them, they abandoned the undertaking they had intended; if it flew straight ahead, they resolved to carry on; and if it flew to the right, they said, “This is an auspicious and blessed affair.” In this way birds became a source of superstition. Even birds merely seen in the sky could serve that purpose: the crow was deemed unlucky, as was the owl and certain other birds.

Others drew evil portents from particular times. It became widespread among them to claim that a woman who married in the month of Shawwal would never be successful and that her husband would not love her. This is sheer falsehood, for the Prophet ﷺ contracted marriage with the Mother of the Believers ʿAʾishah (may Allah be pleased with her) in Shawwal and consummated the marriage in Shawwal as well. She used to say, “Which of you enjoys more favor with him than I do?” Despite this, they continued to allege that a woman who married in that month would have an unfortunate marriage—an assertion that is baseless.

Some of them considered traveling on a Wednesday to be inauspicious. They would claim that anyone who set out on a journey that day would inevitably meet with an accident, a loss, or some calamity. This, too, has no basis; Wednesday, Thursday, Tuesday, and the other days are all the same.

Still others regarded the month of Safar—the month that follows Muharram—as unlucky. They would say, “If a person does anything during that month….”