If we command a person to pray and he insults the prayer, do we remain silent and not command him?
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The questioner : Ibn Abbas, what does this include? If enjoining good and forbidding evil is involved, for example, if you know that the man you are commanding to do good is a fool, and you command him to pray, for instance, in congregation, does that mean he is insulting the prayer or something like that? Do I avoid giving the command?
The Shaykh : No, that is not accepted, because the hadith of Ibn Abbas is in the Qur'an itself. Now, as for this case, if you command him, he might mock you. He is not mocking the Qur'an, nor is he mocking the legal ruling. But the Qur'an is what these polytheists mock, and it is not fitting for me to place the Qur'an among a people who mock it. So, command them to do good and forbid them from evil, even if they have preceded in doing so. We stipulated this condition so that it does not turn into something else. But as for this one who insulted, is the meaning that he insulted the prayer itself, a real insult, and that by commanding him to do it he insulted it, or was he insulting it from the start?
The Shaykh : No, that is not accepted, because the hadith of Ibn Abbas is in the Qur'an itself. Now, as for this case, if you command him, he might mock you. He is not mocking the Qur'an, nor is he mocking the legal ruling. But the Qur'an is what these polytheists mock, and it is not fitting for me to place the Qur'an among a people who mock it. So, command them to do good and forbid them from evil, even if they have preceded in doing so. We stipulated this condition so that it does not turn into something else. But as for this one who insulted, is the meaning that he insulted the prayer itself, a real insult, and that by commanding him to do it he insulted it, or was he insulting it from the start?
Source
قناة «فضيلة الشيخ محمد بن صالح العثيمين»، 4429 - 4600 إذا كنا إذا أمرنا شخص بالصلاة سب الصلاة هل نسكت ولا نأمره؟ ابن عثيمين — youtube.com
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.
