English

PRAYER DURING TRAVEL The five daily prayers in islam should be offered at a certain time when a muslim is at home or is not travelling. However, some times it is necessary to travel from place to place or from one country to another. During the travel perhaps there are no facilities for preparing oneself for prayer, or the timing of the travel will interfere with the proper performance of prayer. Islam, therefore, allows a muslim, when travelling from one place to another, to join two prayers together at one time, such as Zuhur and ‘Asr at the time zuhur or ‘asr. But if a muslim decides to join two prayers together at the latter time, he should have the intention during the time of the first prayer of joining the two prayers later. The same permission is also given to muslim to join the sunset and the night prayers whilst travelling. A muslim has the right to join the two prayers together either at the time of the beginning of the first prayer or the time of the latter. But there are some conditions which must be fulfilled, i.e. the travelling must be of a certain length and must have a worthy purpose. In order to make it simpler for a muslim to perform his prayer duties, it is permission to offer Zuhur and ‘Asr, each of two raka’ats instead of four, and also the night prayer, ‘Isha’. These are the ordinary cases in which islam allows us to shorten prayers and join them together. But in some other cases permission is also given to join two prayers together, such as illnes or when heavy rain prevents people from getting to the mosque as usual, or when there is excessive heat. These are sufficient reasons. The previous permission to join prayers together and to shorten them has been taken from the verse of the holy Qur’an which says: “when you travel throughout the world, there is no blame attached to you if you shorten your prayer for fear that the unbeliever may attack you, for the unbelievers are born enemies into you.” According to this verse, it seems that, if there is no fear during the travel, there is no need is to shorten the prayer; and this was commented upon by Omar, the second Caliph, who was asked why God gave us permission to shorten and join together prayers. Omar replied that he too had wondered the same thing and said: “Then I mentioned this to the prophet (peace be upon him!), his answer was that this must be considered as one of the mercies of God: we have to accept it.”