Kitab at-Taharah and Kitab as-Salah

The purity and prayer sections of Sunan Ibn Majah cover familiar ground already treated in the other five collections but are notable for the additional hadiths they contribute — some authenticated, some weak — and for the specific juristic questions on which Ibn Majah's collection provides the clearest or the only available textual evidence.

Kitab at-Taharah opens with hadiths on the types of water and their purifying properties, following the same organizational logic as the other Sunan collections. Ibn Majah's contribution begins to show in his coverage of hadiths on dental hygiene and the miswak (tooth stick), which he treats with more attention than most other collectors. He records multiple hadiths on the virtue of the miswak and its use before prayer, its use by the Prophet consistently, and the hadith — found in the two Sahihs but elaborated in Ibn Majah — that the miswak purifies the mouth and pleases the Lord. Scholars working on prophetic medicine and personal hygiene cite Ibn Majah's miswak chapters as among his most practically useful contributions.

The chapters on wudu in Ibn Majah's Sunan include some hadiths on the virtue of the act itself that are found only or primarily in his collection. The hadith that impurities (dhunub) depart with the water of wudu when each limb is washed, such that the last drop carries away the last sin, is among the motivational hadiths for wudu that Ibn Majah preserved. While similar narrations appear in Muslim's Sahih, Ibn Majah's version with its specific imagery became one of the most frequently quoted in popular religious literature encouraging the regular renewal of wudu.

The ghusl chapters contain a narration unique to Ibn Majah about the Prophet's manner of performing ghusl after sexual intercourse, recorded through a different chain than those in the two Sahihs. Scholars graded this narration and found it acceptable, and it provided additional evidentiary support for the sequence the majority of jurists consider preferred.

Kitab as-Salah in Ibn Majah's Sunan has several notable features. His treatment of the prayer times includes hadiths on the inadvisability of delaying prayers and the virtue of performing them at their earliest times, material he covers more fully than some other collectors. The famous hadith that the prayer performed at its time is the deed most beloved to Allah appears in the two Sahihs, but Ibn Majah's version includes additional context from the Companion who narrated it, specifying that he continued asking about the most beloved deeds and the Prophet placed jihad last — suggesting that even the greatest acts of external worship are secondary to the discipline of performing the five prayers faithfully.

The congregational prayer chapters record the Prophet's statement that whoever performs the prayer in congregation for forty consecutive days, never missing the opening takbir, will be recorded as free from two things: free from the Fire and free from hypocrisy. This hadith, graded as hasan by some scholars and found primarily in Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah, was widely used in motivational literature encouraging attendance at the mosque for congregational prayer.

The chapters on the Friday prayer, the Eid prayers, and the eclipse and rain prayers follow the standard patterns of the other Sunan collections, but often with variant chains that allow scholars to corroborate or evaluate narrations preserved in those other collections. Ibn Majah's prayer section is best understood not as a primary reference on its own but as a valuable corroborating source for narrations whose authenticity is strengthened by their appearance in his collection alongside the others.