and a few of our own Hanafi jurists went so far as to declare that merely reciting a surah in the last two rak‘ahs makes sujud al-sahw (the prostration of forgetfulness) obligatory! The commentators on al-Minya—among them Ibrahim al-Halabi, Ibn Amir Hajj al-Halabi, and others—have refuted this claim most forcefully, and I am sure that anyone who voiced it simply had not heard the relevant hadith; had he known it, he would never have spoken so. Al-Nawawi states: “Our scholars differ as to whether the third rak‘ah should be made longer than the fourth when we already maintain that the first is longer than the second.” I add: al-Bayhaqi transmitted a report about lengthening the third over the fourth from Abd Allah b. Abi Awfa, but its chain contains Tarafah al-Hadrami, an unknown narrator, as noted above. Al-Bazzar and al-Tabarani in al-Kabir also record it through the same line, according to Majmaʿ (2/133). (1) This refers to the hadith of Abu Qatadah, whose documentation appears above (p. 457). It shows that the sunnah is to recite al-Fatihah in the last two rak‘ahs of a four-rak‘ah prayer. That is the view of the overwhelming majority of scholars from the Companions onward, as well as of our own jurists, though they allow a choice between reciting, remaining silent, or uttering tasbih. Imam Muhammad said in al-Muwattaʾ (p. 101): “The sunnah in an obligatory prayer is to recite in the first two rak‘ahs Fatihat al-Kitab together with a surah, and in the last two rak‘ahs only Fatihat al-Kitab. If you do not recite it in them, it is still sufficient, and if you recite tasbih in them, it is sufficient. This is also the opinion of Abu Hanifah.” Ishaq b. Rahuyah pointed out a rebuttal to both of them, as reported by Ishaq b. Mansur al-Marwazi in his Masaʾil: “Ishaq said: Reciting Fatihat al-Kitab in the last two rak‘ahs is sunnah, and on…"