Overall meaning:

In both of these hadiths the Prophet ﷺ forbids performing any prayer after the dawn (morning) prayer until the sun has risen and, to the naked eye, climbed the height of a spear—roughly three metres—above the horizon. He likewise prohibits prayer after the afternoon prayer until the sun has set, because praying at those two times resembles the practice of the polytheists who worship the sun at its rising and at its setting; we have been commanded not to imitate them in their acts of worship, for “whoever imitates a people is counted among them.”

Differences among the scholars:

1. The jurists have disagreed over prayer during these periods:
   • The majority hold that it is disliked, relying on these authentic hadiths and others.
   • The Ẓāhirīs deem it permissible, claiming that the prohibitive reports were abrogated. The scholars, however, have treated every hadith they cite as an abrogating text as nothing more than restricting an unconditional statement or specifying a general one. Abrogation is resorted to only when reconciliation is impossible, and here reconciliation is easily achieved.

2. They then differed over which prayers are covered by the prohibition:
   • The Hanafis, Malikis, and Hanbalis maintain that it includes every supererogatory prayer except the two units offered after circumambulating the Kaʿbah, arguing from the general wording of the hadiths of prohibition.
   • The Shafiʿis—and a narration from Imam Ahmad chosen by Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah and a group of our Hanbali colleagues—confine the ban to voluntary prayers that have no particular occasion. Prayers tied to a specific cause, such as the two units for greeting the mosque or the two units after ablution, are permissible whenever their cause occurs.
   Their evidence is the hadiths that address those particular prayers; these function as specific qualifiers of the general hadiths of prohibition. By this view all the texts are harmonised and both sets of hadiths are acted upon.

3. They also disagreed about when the morning prohibition begins: from the appearance of the second dawn or from the performance of the dawn prayer?
   • The Hanafis—and this is the well-known opinion in the Hanbali school—say it begins with the break of the second dawn, basing themselves on several hadiths, among them the report collected by the four compilers of the Sunan from Ibn ʿUmar in which the Prophet ﷺ said, “There is no…"