Mufsid: What Spoils an Act of Worship Already Begun

A mufsid act is the type of act which spoils an already commenced act of worship. Suppose a person is praying, in the masjid or at home in his room, and one of his siblings, one of his brothers, cracks a joke in the next room, and he cannot help himself but starts giggling and laughing. What happens when he laughs? That act of laughing is called a mufsid act, and what it breaks is the prayer. If he laughed audibly in front of others, so that people heard him, then both his prayer and his wuḍūʾ are broken, and he must go and renew the wuḍūʾ as well as the prayer. If he only smiled a little, without making much of a sound, nothing happens. But if he laughs to himself while praying — because for some reason he remembers the joke, or the like — then the laugh breaks the prayer, and nothing happens to the wuḍūʾ: he gives the salām to the right and to the left, says Allāhu akbar, and starts again. The only person who laughs at his own joke, in any case, is a person who has lost his mind and is going mad. The first sign of madness is laughing at one's own jokes; the second — said only in jest — is looking for hairs in the palm of the hand; and the real trouble begins when they are actually found. This ranking of acts is very important to comprehend, and really to understand.