Sharh Kitab Adab al-Mashy ila al-Salat aw al-Ibadat (al-Salat, al-Zakat, al-Siyam)
- Author died
- 1389 AH
- Editions
- Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Qāsim
Sharh Kitab Adab al-Mashy ila al-Salat aw al-Ibadat (al-Salat, al-Zakat, al-Siyam) ("Commentary on the Book of the Etiquettes of Walking to Prayer, or Acts of Worship: Prayer, Zakat, and Fasting") is a legal commentary by Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al al-Shaykh (1311–1389 AH / 1893–1969 CE), the former Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, on the Hanbali primer on acts of worship authored by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1206 AH / 1792 CE).
Origin and Compilation
The text represents the oral dictations and lessons (taqrirat) delivered by Muhammad ibn Ibrahim to his students. The scholar's student Muhammad ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Qasim attended these lectures and transcribed them into his notebooks twice, first in 1369 AH and again in 1370 AH.
Ibn Qasim preserved these manuscript transcriptions for fifty years. In 1418 AH (1997/1998 CE), he began compiling, editing, and fair-copying the material, integrating the commentary directly with the matn of the base text. He harmonized variant expressions from his recorded drafts, checked the citations of prophetic traditions, added explanatory annotations to points the original lessons had omitted or left concise, and published the completed work at his own expense.
Scope and Content
The base text, originally compiled by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to cover the essential religious duties that every Muslim must know, addresses the rulings of ritual prayer (al-salat), funerals (al-jana'iz), the alms-tax (al-zakat), and fasting (al-siyam), alongside related manners such as greeting and asking permission. In his commentary, Muhammad ibn Ibrahim notes that the title Adab al-Mashy ila al-Salat ("Etiquettes of Walking to Prayer") was likely given by later students who named the treatise after its opening chapter, whereas the author intended a broader manual on acts of worship (Kitab al-Ibadat).
The commentary explains why specific subjects were excluded from the primer: ritual purification (al-taharah) was omitted to keep the manual concise, as its rules and invalidators were commonly studied in separate works, while pilgrimage (al-hajj) was customarily treated in dedicated treatises on rites (manasik).
Methodology
Muhammad ibn Ibrahim's commentary follows a concise and accessible pedagogical approach tailored for students of jurisprudence. In substantive juristic issues where scholars held differing views, he outlines the varying opinions, adopts precautionary positions (al-ahwat) where supported, and evaluates the strengths of conflicting legal arguments against textual evidence from the Quran and the Sunnah, weighing the stronger (al-rajih) against the weaker (al-marjuh).
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