Fiqh & astronomy · from the dissertation

Are the prayers even obligatory then? — The schools’ dispute

If evening redness never disappears, the time of ʿIshāʾ simply does not exist. What follows legally? The schools of law have argued over this for a thousand years — triggered by inquiries from Bulghār on the Volga. Chapter 3 of the dissertation reconstructs the entire discourse from the original sources; here is its story.

The question comes from Bulghār (921 CE)

The oldest report comes from Ibn Faḍlān, envoy of the caliph al-Muqtadir to the Volga Bulgars: during an evening conversation with a tailor from Baghdad, the muezzin suddenly calls to prayer — to Fajr, for dawn breaks before the evening redness has vanished. The muezzin, he is told, had not slept for a month for fear of missing the morning prayer; a pot of meat will not cook through between sunset and Fajr. Ibn Faḍlān records precisely, in juristic terms, that al-shafaq al-aḥmar persists through the night — the oldest attestation of “persistent twilight”.

From Bulghār the question reached the scholars of Transoxania: al-Ḥalwānī first ruled that ʿIshāʾ must be made up (qaḍāʾ). Then the question came to al-Baqqālī in Khwarazm — who answered with an analogy that shapes the dispute to this day:

What is to be said of someone whose hands are cut off up to the elbows — how many actions are obligatory in his ablution? “Three, due to the loss of the place (maḥall) of the fourth.” — And exactly the same applies to the fifth prayer.

al-Baqqālī (d. ca. 1060) to al-Ḥalwānī’s messenger in the mosque of Khwarazm — al-Ḥalwānī consented and revised his ruling.

The Ḥanafī main position: no time, no obligation

Behind the analogy stands a precise distinction of legal theory: the prayer time is not merely a frame but the cause of the obligation itself (sabab nafs al-wujūb). If the place of the obligation falls away — like the forearm in ablution — the obligation never arises; there is nothing to make up. Thus al-Nasafī codifies it in Kanz al-daqāʾiq: “Who does not find the time of ʿIshāʾ and Witr is not obligated with either.” This became the school’s main position (muʿtamad).

That this was lived practice is attested by the Ottoman traveller Evliyâ Çelebi in the 17th century from the town of Mujik north of the Caspian Sea:

In this land the night prayer is never performed — its time does not exist here, as the noble Sharia describes. When we nevertheless attempted to pray it in congregation, the scholars prohibited us: “The early scholars and the mujtahidūn came here and could not find the night prayer’s time. So they did not perform it — and even wrote books on this!” And they showed us hundreds of volumes.

Evliyâ Çelebi (d. 1684), Seyahatnâme — on hundreds of thousands of devout, regularly praying Hashdak Muslims who never perform ʿIshāʾ.

Fiction or fact? Ibn Quṭlūbughā’s defence of reality

Some jurists held persistent twilight to be a phantasm — incompatible with the Qurʾānic statements on day and night, or at best confined beyond the inhabited world near Gog and Magog. Against them Ibn Quṭlūbughā (d. 1474) wrote his “Selection of Thoughts on the Matter of Bulghār”: it is among the recognised things of astronomy that when the sun’s maximum depression falls below 17 degrees, the first half of the night is evening twilight and the second is dawn — “the time of absolute darkness ceases to exist”. He was thus the first to state explicitly that Fajr then begins at astronomical midnight. This time the inquiry came from the Bulghār of the Kipchak Turks at 61° north; the practical follow-up — pray tarāwīḥ or use the scarce time for the saḥūr meal? — he answered pragmatically: both valid, depending on the condition of the fasting person.

The dissenting voice: Ibn al-Humām and the Dajjāl ḥadīth

The weightiest counter-position came from Ibn al-Humām (d. 1457): time is only one of several identifiers (muʿarrifāt) of an obligation established “in the matter itself” (fī nafs al-amr). His main evidence is the Dajjāl ḥadīth: if on the “day like a year” one is to estimate (uqdurū lahū qadrahū), the ḥadīth makes hundreds of prayers obligatory whose times do not exist — the obligation does not vanish with the time.

The finest closing point was set by Çerkeşîzâde Mehmed Tevfik (d. 1901), whose printed but hitherto overlooked treatise the dissertation evaluates for the first time. His guiding question: what is “regarded as existent” in taqdīr — the cause of obligation (taqdīr al-sabab) or the time itself (taqdīr al-waqt)? He shows the cause can be construed as existing, but not the divine address to perform — yet still deems the position of obligation preferable (rājiḥ), being more precautious.

The Shāfiʿīs: not whether, but how

For the Shāfiʿīs the obligation stands under all circumstances — their legal theory permits the qiyās to the Dajjāl ḥadīth, the Ḥanafī one does not (prohibition of ḥaml al-muṭlaq ʿalā l-muqayyad). Only the how is disputed. Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī (d. 1016) and Qāḍī Ḥusayn (d. 1069) founded aqrab al-bilād: after sunset one waits as long as evening redness takes to disappear in the nearest land with regular nights.

al-Zarkashī (d. 1392) refined it: do not adopt the absolute time span but its ratio to the night’s length (aqrab al-bilād bi-l-nisba) — exactly the method by which the old IZA calendar calculated until 2018. Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 1567) considered plain making-up (qaḍāʾ) the safest — and rejected artificial Fajr times as “truly absurd” (baʿīd jiddan): one cannot dismiss the perceptibly breaking dawn in favour of a distant reference location; in nights of persistent twilight, Fajr begins at astronomical midnight.

Mālikīs, Ḥanbalīs — and a rediscovery

The Mālikīs mostly adopt the Shāfiʿī solution. Their first witness al-Qarāfī (d. 1285) relates an inquiry from Bulghār: the nights were so short that one would miss either breaking the fast or the prayer — the scholars of Bukhārā ruled: breaking the fast takes precedence, for protecting health comes before acts of worship (maṣlaḥat al-ajsād muqaddama ʿalā l-ʿibādāt). Incidentally, the dissertation here made a discovery: al-Qarāfī’s geographical work, believed lost, has survived — circulating in an edition as the anonymous Kitāb gharāʾib al-funūn, it can now be attributed to him. The Ḥanbalīs are split: al-Buhūtī follows aqrab al-bilād, while al-ʿAnqarī (d. 1953) even considers non-obligation to be what their own legal principles require.

Thought experiment North Pole: five prayers a year

How far the tradition thought is shown by Darendevî (d. 1739), who answered Kâtip Çelebi’s famous “three questions”: at the North Pole the year is a single day — Ẓuhr enters at the end of June, ʿAṣr in early August, Maghrib at the end of September, ʿIshāʾ in mid-October, Fajr at the end of January. A Shāfiʿī would have to make up the five daily prayers, a Ḥanafī would not — yet five prayers per year would remain obligatory even for him, for the signs exist, merely stretched over months. The Dajjāl ḥadīth’s “day like a year” becomes literal reality at the pole.

The common denominator — and the app

For all the dispute, all four schools agree on two points, and precisely these carry this app’s calculation: (1) As long as the astronomical signs exist, they are binding — a really existing time may not be bypassed by a substitute calculation; hence the standard angles apply whenever they are reachable. (2) In nights of persistent twilight, astronomical midnight counts as the break of Fajr — exactly the anchor at which thuluth al-layl divides the night into thirds of depth (see its own article).

This text is a factual introduction, not a fatwa. Your local scholars and community remain authoritative.

More from the knowledge section

The polar problem — where local sighting reaches its limit · Thuluth al-layl — the third-of-the-night method and its justification · Where do 18° and 17° come from? — Twelve centuries of the angle debate · Why tamkīn? — A thousand years of precision corrections · Which calendar gets it right? Germany’s prayer-time calendars compared