Nothing Cancels the Prayer

On the subject of excuses that keep people from prayer — the excuses Shayṭān fits to a person's trade and personality — one question in particular is commonly put to the scholars. A questioner once explained to one of the mashāyikh that, working as he did in the present age, treated almost as a slave to his job with not a minute allowed off and his prayer times counted against him, he saw no alternative but to make up his prayers as qaḍāʾ at home — and asked whether this was acceptable. That particular shaykh, known for being exacting and firm on the point, answered that although the questioner might justify the position to himself, he would be shown that the position was mistaken, and that prayer could in fact be performed anywhere, at any time. The questioner objected that he knew his own workplace, and that he would be thrown out of it. He agreed to give him an example and let him supply the answer himself.

Imagine travelling by air, seatbelt fastened, when severe turbulence strikes and the aircraft begins to shake violently — an engine failing, the plane descending, perhaps toward an airport, perhaps toward open water. Imagine, further, that a second crisis strikes at the same moment: a sudden, severe stomach complaint, while seated beside other passengers. The captain's voice insists over the intercom that no one leave a seat; the cabin crew repeat the instruction; the warning lights stay lit. Would the instruction be obeyed regardless? It would not: the need is too pressing, the seatbelt comes off, and the toilet is reached whatever the consequence — even knowing one might fall on one's head and be destroyed — because the urge within is so strong that no law will stop it. In the same way, a believer who offers a flimsy excuse about pressure at work reveals, by that excuse alone, how weak the underlying connection to Allah has become. Nothing in the universe genuinely prevents a Muslim from praying.

How strict the Sharīʿah is on this point is shown by a case that goes further still. Imagine a ship broken apart at sea, a passenger afloat and conscious, clinging to a single plank of wood, the panic already passed and full awareness intact. Looking up and judging, with certainty, from the sun's position that Ẓuhr has entered, that person remains answerable for that Ẓuhr on the Day of Judgement even in such a state. One might object that prayer seems impossible while still in the water; the answer given is that the head is dipped under by way of wuḍūʾ, and the prayer performed as best it can be even there. Nothing short of the total absence of every faculty needed to pray removes the obligation. Only where someone has no limbs, no functioning mind, no capacity of any kind at all — as in a hospital bed with every bone broken and set in plaster, even the eyes closed, with no connection to the outside and no way of making wuḍūʾ or tayammum or anything of the kind — does one particular view within the Ḥanafī school allow the prayer to be delayed as qaḍāʾ, or hold that Allah will perhaps not require it because it cannot be done; this is a single view, and even this the majority of the scholars reject.

It is far too easy to excuse prayer away, or to push it into qaḍāʾ, on the grounds that work is itself ḥalāl and a form of worship, a farḍ being fulfilled, so that a private relationship with Allah can be conducted at home instead — sheer nonsense. Many Muslims abandon their prayers wholesale in exactly this way: leaving too early for work to catch Fajr, returning only after ʿIshāʾ, and praying everything together at the end of the day. Anyone who has genuinely missed a prayer certainly owes its qaḍāʾ, but this pattern is not the rule that governs prayer; prayer itself must still be performed on time.