Chapter: The Eclipse Prayer

The two terms, kusūf and khusūf, are usually distinguished as follows: the first refers to the disappearance of all or part of the sun’s light, whereas the second refers to the disappearance of all or part of the moon’s light. This is the normal and correct usage.

Solar and lunar eclipses have ordinary, physical causes that can be known through astronomical calculations of the sun’s and moon’s movements. They also have hidden, moral causes. Both the visible and the unseen causes are ultimately divine.

Whenever divine wisdom requires that one of Allah’s cosmic signs be altered—such as an eclipse, an earthquake, or the like—to awaken people from their heedlessness of His worship or to deter them from violating His commands, He brings about the ordinary, physical means that disturb the established order: the withdrawal of light from one of the two great luminaries, the eruption of volcanoes, the stirring of winds, the crashing of thunderbolts, and other signs in His creation.

By this the servants come to realize that behind these magnificent heavens stands a Powerful Disposer who holds everything in His hand and encompasses all things.

He is able to punish them with any of His cosmic signs: He annihilated earlier nations with thunderbolts, raging winds, floods, earthquakes, and the earth’s caving in beneath them. He is equally able to deprive them of the light of the sun and moon so that they grope about blindly on the earth, or to afflict them with drought so that their trees wither and their rivers run dry. All of this is to remind them that the universe is in His grasp, that they might revere His Majesty and fear His retribution.

Yet we live in an age dominated by materialism, and people now see in these altered signs nothing but their material aspect. They have forgotten—or never learned—the spiritual meanings: the warning of Allah’s punishment and the reminder of His favors. Indeed, to Allah we belong and to Him we return.

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah, may Allah have mercy on him, summarized the matter thus:

“Solar and lunar eclipses occur at set times, just as the rising of the new crescent occurs at a set time. This belongs to the order Allah has established for night and day, winter and summer, and all other phenomena that follow the movement of the sun and moon. It is among the signs of Allah, the Exalted: ‘He is the One who made the sun a radiance and the moon a light, and determined phases for it’ and: ‘The sun and the moon move with precise calculation.’

Just as Allah’s established norm is that the new crescent is not seen except on the night of the thirtieth or the thirty-first, so too He has decreed that the sun is not eclipsed except at the time of conjunction, and the moon is not eclipsed except when it is full. Knowledge of the crescent’s customary timing is general knowledge shared by all, whereas knowledge of the customary timing of solar and lunar eclipses is possessed only by those who can compute their movements—and the report of such a calculator is not …”