The Asr Prayer at Qurayzah: Ijtihad, Literalism, and a Single Truth

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

As the Companions made their way to Banū Qurayẓah in scattered groups, some setting off sooner than others, since Madinah was spread across a wide area with outlying settlements, most arrived in time to pray ʿAṣr before sunset. Others, still on the road as the sun began to set, faced a genuine dilemma: the Prophet's ﷺ order was "pray ʿAṣr only at Banū Qurayẓah," but if taken completely literally, following it meant missing the prayer's valid time window entirely.

The Companions split into two camps. Some understood the order as an urgent figure of speech meaning "hurry," never intended to require missing the prayer's window outright, and prayed ʿAṣr where they stood before continuing on. Others took the command at face value and delayed their ʿAṣr until they physically reached Banū Qurayẓah, praying it as a makeup (qaḍāʾ) after Maghrib had already come in. When both groups reported what they had done, the Prophet ﷺ criticized neither.

Dr. Qadhi draws out the far-reaching implications of this episode for Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh). First, it establishes that when equally qualified scholars (mujtahids) reach different conclusions through legitimate reasoning (ijtihād), neither is bound to follow the other's conclusion, provided both are genuinely qualified, a qualification he stresses applies to formal training in the textual sciences of the Sharīʿah, and separately to purely technical or empirical questions (such as determining the direction of prayer) where non-specialist knowledge may in fact exceed a scholar's.

Second, and more subtly, the episode is widely used by scholars, particularly within the Ḥanbalī school of legal theory, as evidence that in matters of fiqh there is ultimately one single correct answer (al-ḥaqq wāḥid), not multiple simultaneously valid truths, even though sincere, qualified disagreement is fully tolerated and even rewarded. The reasoning: the Prophet ﷺ could only have intended one of the two possible meanings by his command, not both at once, and the Companions themselves split into exactly two camps rather than assuming a range of valid intents. This is affirmed by a well-known ḥadīth in which the Prophet ﷺ states that a judge who exercises independent legal reasoning and reaches the correct ruling earns two rewards, while one who reaches an incorrect ruling still earns one reward for the sincere effort, language that presupposes a single correct ruling exists, distinct from whether the mistaken party is blameworthy (they are not).

Because this was a one-time situation unlikely to recur in the same form, the Prophet ﷺ saw no benefit in clarifying which reading he had intended, sparing the group that had guessed differently any unnecessary correction. Dr. Qadhi extends the lesson to an enduring tension within Islamic law between literalist and more circumstance-sensitive approaches to applying textual commands, a tension he traces back to this very moment among the Companions, and one that continues among the classical schools of law and contemporary scholarship, provided the differing positions come from those genuinely qualified to reason from the Sharīʿah's primary texts rather than from untrained voices asserting authority they have not earned.