Q625 :A friend of mine said that only what the
Prophet said is Sunnah. If he simply did something but did not state
that people should do it, then it is not Sunnah. My argument is that
everything the Prophet said or did is Sunnah. Please clarify.
A625 : Your friend’s argument is perhaps more
accurate. I will give you an example. Sometimes the Prophet read long
passages of the Qur’an in his prayers. It is reported that once he read
26 pages of a surah in Maghrib prayer, dividing it between the two
Rak’ahs. On another occasion, he was offering night worship alone when
some of his netpanions joined him. It is reported that in the first
rakah he read the three longest surahs in the Qur’an, which together
are about one hundred pages. But when it was reported to him that an
imam elongated his prayers, he was very angry. He spoke very strongly
against making prayers very long and gave the example of a number of
surahs suggesting that they are the appropriate length of any rakah in
a congregational prayer. These surahs are about 10-12 lines each. This
meant that the Sunnah is what the Prophet has said, but not what he
did. On another occasion, he explained that further, stating that if a
person is praying alone, he may elongate his prayer as much as he
pleases, but if he is leading a congregation, he should make his prayer
of reasonable length. There are certain things which the Prophet did
as matters of personal choice or because they were normal practice in
his society. They have no bearing on religious matters. Such practices
include the wearing of a particular shape of clothes, or the wearing of
a turban or a head-cover in prayer or in normal situations, or the use
of kohl (or surmah) to darken his eyes. He did not suggest at any time
that we should do likewise. Therefore, such practices remain his own
personal choice. They are not Sunnah. However, if one follows the
Prophet’s example with no intention other than doing what the Prophet
did, he will earn reward from Allah, not because he has done a Sunnah
but because of his keenness to follow the Prophet’s lead. To suggest
that those practices are Sunnah, is to make them renetmended to all
people when the Prophet did not renetmend them.
Our Dialogue ( Source : Arab News – Jeddah )