Excessive thinking during prayer and wandering of the mind: does it invalidate the prayer?
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
Question:
May Allah reward you. Does the wandering of the mind during prayer and excessive thinking require the one praying to repeat the prayer?
Answer:
It is not obligatory for him, nor is he required to repeat the prayer; he has prayed. Yes. However, this diminishes his reward, and he may not receive any reward for the prayer. If his heart is absent throughout the entire prayer due to distracting thoughts, he will not receive any reward. But he is not ordered to repeat it, because he has prayed. He receives reward according to the extent to which his heart was present: it may be half, a quarter, a tenth, or less or more than that, depending on how much his heart was present in it.
May Allah reward you. Does the wandering of the mind during prayer and excessive thinking require the one praying to repeat the prayer?
Answer:
It is not obligatory for him, nor is he required to repeat the prayer; he has prayed. Yes. However, this diminishes his reward, and he may not receive any reward for the prayer. If his heart is absent throughout the entire prayer due to distracting thoughts, he will not receive any reward. But he is not ordered to repeat it, because he has prayed. He receives reward according to the extent to which his heart was present: it may be half, a quarter, a tenth, or less or more than that, depending on how much his heart was present in it.
Source
قناة «العلامة الدكتور صالح الفوزان»، كثرة التفكير في الصلاة وشرود الذهن، هل يبطلها؟ الشيخ صالح بن فوزان الفوزان — youtube.com
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.