Q.1. I am about to move to Britain where I will take up work. Since Friday is a working day there and mosques are few, what should I do with regard to Friday prayers?
Q.2. A person who failed to do the pilgrimage when he was in good health is now old and weak. He is physically unable to undertake the journey. What should he do?
M.A. Dada
A.1. You will be surprised at the number of mosques that are available in Western countries. When you get there, you should find out which are the nearest mosques in your locality and arrange with your employers leave of absence at the time of Friday prayers. Most people arrange to take their lunch break at that time, and attend Friday prayers at their nearest mosque. If you are working in a remote area, and you are the only Muslim there, you offer Zuhr prayer instead. But if there are a few Muslims working at the same place, you could join together and arrange Friday prayers at your place of work.
A.2. A person who can financially afford to do the pilgrimage but whose health is too poor to enable him to undertake the journey should ask someone else to do the pilgrimage on his behalf.
He should pay that person all the expenses involved, but no wages, unless they agree a sum of money in excess of the normal expenses, then the one doing the pilgrimage is entitled to take what he saves.
However, some scholars are of the view that it is acceptable that the one doing the pilgrimage on behalf of someone else receives an agreed wage. The only condition for substitute pilgrimage to be valid is that the person doing the pilgrimage should have already done his own obligatory pilgrimage. In substitute pilgrimage, a woman can do it on behalf of a man or a woman, and the reverse is also valid.
Q.1. Is it true that there is a prayer called qaza-i umri, which is offered to compensate for all the prayers one has missed in one’s life? If not, how to offer these missed prayers? If one misses a prayer for some reason, when should he offer it? Is there a time when one cannot join a congregational prayer already in progress, such as the imam being in the last part of his prayer?
S. Tungekar
Q.2. If one has missed a prayer and wants to offer it in compensation, i.e. qaza, should he offer both the obligatory part and the Sunnah, or only the obligatory part?
Nazneen
A.1. There is no such a thing as a prayer to compensate for all missed prayers. This is an invention that no scholar worthy of the name considers. A person who did not pray for several years and begins to pray regularly is only required to genuinely repent of his past negligence. Genuine and sincere repentance, coupled with a resolve not to neglect prayer again should, God willing, ensure God’s forgiveness of the past.
A person who regularly attends to his prayer but on the odd occasion misses a prayer does so either out of negligence, or for a valid reason. The only valid reasons are sleep, loss of consciousness, or forgetfulness. In such situations, he must offer the missed prayer immediately on becoming conscious of it. So, if you remember that you have not offered Zuhr prayer and it is already Asr time, you immediately pray Zuhr and then Asr. If you wake up in the morning and the sun has already risen, you proceed immediately to attend to your missed prayer.
On the other hand, sometimes you are in a situation where you cannot offer your prayer, as happens if you are in a non-Muslim area, far from home or any mosque, and you do not have the facility to attend to your prayer. You should try to find a place to do it, but if you cannot, you combine that prayer with the next one, but only Zuhr with Asr, or Maghrib with Isha, and you pray the two normally. This is known as combining prayers for a need. You can combine the two prayers either in advance or at the later time, as is convenient for you.
Thus, if you fear that you will miss Asr prayer, you offer it with Zuhr before you go out. If you are already out and you cannot manage Zuhr, you offer it when you return home at Asr time.
You can join a congregational prayer at any time while it is in progress, even when the imam is already seated in the final tashahhud. You will need to complete what you have missed of it after the imam has finished.
A.2. Prayer is a time-related duty, which means that when an obligatory prayer is missed, its time has lapsed and it cannot be offered unless there is a valid reason for missing it. The valid reason is being unconscious of it either through sleep or forgetfulness.
The Prophet says: “Whoever sleeps through a prayer or forgets it should offer it when he is conscious of it, because it is then that it is due.” This means that if you sleep through Fajr prayer despite having taken the necessary precautions to wake up, then you must offer it as soon as possible after waking up. This is not qaza or compensatory prayer; it is offering it on time, as the Prophet says.
Qaza is supposed to compensate for missed prayer, but if a prayer is missed through negligence, it cannot be compensated for, because its time range has lapsed. The only way is to genuinely repent and resolve not to neglect prayers again. When you offer a missed prayer, you offer the obligatory part only, but the Sunnah of Fajr and the Witr prayers can be offered after the time has lapsed.