Salah in Al-Wajiz: Prayer and Its Legal Elements

Al-Ghazali's prayer chapter in Al-Wajiz presents the Shafi'i school's comprehensive prayer law with characteristic clarity. He organizes the material around the prayer's conditions, pillars, obligations, and recommended acts — a structure that allows the student to understand both the minimum required for prayer validity and the fuller form of prayer that realizes its spiritual potential.

The times of the five prayers are presented with the Shafi'i distinctions between preferred (ikhtiyari) and tolerated (idtirari) time windows. Each prayer has a preferred time during which it should ideally be performed and a later tolerated window for legitimate reasons. Praying in the tolerated window without a valid excuse is disliked but not sinful; praying after the full window without excuse is sinful and requires qada' (making up the missed prayer).

The conditions for prayer validity are listed: Islam, sanity, discernment, removal of hadath, removal of najasah, covering the 'awrah, facing the qiblah, and entering the prayer time. Al-Ghazali notes that the condition of facing the qiblah is reduced to facing the general direction for those who cannot determine the precise direction, and is waived entirely for supererogatory prayer while traveling (when mounted on an animal).

The seventeen pillars of prayer are listed with brevity: intention (coinciding with the opening takbir), standing (for those capable in obligatory prayers), the opening takbir, al-Fatihah (including the Basmalah as its first verse), maintaining the sequence of al-Fatihah's verses, ruku' (bowing), tuma'ninah in ruku', rising from ruku', tuma'ninah in the upright position, sujud (on seven body parts), tuma'ninah in sujud, sitting between the two prostrations, tuma'ninah in that sitting, the final tashahhud, sitting for it, invoking blessings on the Prophet in it, and the first salam.

Al-Ghazali's discussion of sujud as-sahw (prostration of forgetfulness) reflects the Shafi'i position that it is performed after the salam — the prayer is completed, the salam is given, and then the two additional prostrations are performed followed by another salam. He notes the evidence from the hadith of Abu Hurayrah in which the Prophet performed sujud as-sahw after completing and giving salam.

The discussion of supererogatory prayers emphasizes their role in spiritual development. Al-Ghazali connects the legal rules of nawafil (voluntary prayers) to their deeper purpose — and this connection between law and spiritual reality is characteristic of al-Ghazali's integrated vision. He cites the hadith qudsi: 'My servant continues to draw near to Me through voluntary acts until I love him, and when I love him, I become his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees' (al-Bukhari) — demonstrating that the voluntary prayers are not mere supererogation but a path to the highest spiritual stations.