Harmonising contradictory narrations (the time for afternoon prayers) (1)

In the next few blogs, I will be looking at Ayatullah Khui again. He was one of the most illustrious scholars of the modern era, and by looking at his works, we are best able to understand and gain insight into the mind of a scholar!

The topic we will be focussing on is seeing how apparently contradictory narrations are harmonised (jam' urfi) by Ayatullah Khui in his Tanqih (1) - we will do this by looking at how he concludes what the time for Salat al-Dhuhr and Salat al-Asr is. His argument is lengthy and I will summarise to help illustrate the point as succinctly as possible, whilst maintaining enough to show how he argues his point.

Part A - the start of Dhuhr

From the Qur'an (17:78), it is clear that the beginning of Dhuhr is midday (duluk in the verse means zawal i.e. midday). However, there are two groups of narrations about the start of Dhuhr (and Asr):

1. Those which make it clear that the start of the time for these prayers is midday - e.g. Zurara from the 5th Imam (AS) who said: "When it becomes midday, the times for Dhuhr and Asr begin" (2)

2. Those which imply the time is a bit after midday - these are split into several sub-categories based on how much after midday:

A. e.g. the sahih narration from Isma'il from 'Abd al-Khaliq, who said: "I asked Abu Abdillah (AS) about the time of Dhuhr, and he said: 'it is a qadam after midday'..." (3)

B. e.g. sahih narration from Fadlaa' from both the 5th and 6th Imam (AS) that they both said: "The time for Dhuhr is two qadam after midday, and Asr is two qadam after that." (4);

C. there are others which talk about it being "dhira' after midday" (5);

D. or qama (6).

[Note I am not going to worry about the meaning of qadam [foot], dhira' [armlength] or qama [body length] here, other than to note it has an implication of a bit after midday, and the relationship between these varies e.g. 2 qadam = 1 dhira' but it is complicated so I will not go into it further]

It should be clear from these narrations that some seem to suggest that it starts at midday, and others have different times slightly after midday - in the next blog, we will look at how Syed Khui deals with this apparent contradiction.

(1)volume 2 on Salat, Page 81 onwards
(2)Wasa`il, Volume 4, page 125 in the Chapter on prayer times, Chapter 4, Hadith 1 (there are others e.g. hadith 5 and 9 on the same page)
(3) As above, Chapter 8, Hadith 11 (there are others e.g. hadith 17 in the same chapter)
(4) As above, Hadith 1
(5) As above, Hadith 3
(6) As above, Hadith 9, 13, 29