“…‘A servant may perform the prayer, yet nothing of it is recorded for him except a tenth, a ninth, an eighth, a seventh, a sixth, a fifth, a quarter, a third, or a half of it.’ (1)
For this reason I pointed out to the brothers that we can never give the prayer its full due—or even come close—unless we first learn in detail how the Prophet ﷺ performed it: its obligations, manners, postures, supplications, and remembrances. Only after that, by applying this knowledge in practice, may we hope that our prayer will restrain us from indecency and wrongdoing and that we will receive the reward and merit that have been promised for it.
Yet acquiring such detailed knowledge is difficult for most people—even for many scholars—because they are bound to a particular legal school. Everyone engaged in the service of the purified sunnah, whether through gathering its texts or deriving rulings from them, knows that each school contains sunan that the others lack, and that all of them also include statements and actions that cannot be soundly attributed to the Prophet ﷺ. Most of this material is found in the writings of the later scholars (2), and we often see them asserting