What to begin with in forbidding evil: hanging an amulet or abandoning prayer
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
The questioner:
Honorable Shaykh, may Allah grant you success, when I see a person hanging an amulet on his car to ward off the evil eye, but he is also one who abandons prayer, with what do I begin to forbid him? Is it the hanging of the amulet or the abandoning of prayer?
The Shaykh:
This is abandoning prayer. Abandoning prayer entirely is disbelief. I know that his abandonment contains nothing, so what does he have from the Qur'an that is valid, or from shirk (associating partners with Allah)?
The questioner:
One.
The Shaykh:
If it is from the Qur'an, he delays forbidding it because there is scholarly disagreement on it. But if it is from other than the Qur'an, he hastens to forbid it, beginning with that, because shirk is greater than abandoning prayer. So he begins by forbidding the hanging of amulets on the car. Then, if he accepts that, he forbids the abandoning of prayer. Yes.
Honorable Shaykh, may Allah grant you success, when I see a person hanging an amulet on his car to ward off the evil eye, but he is also one who abandons prayer, with what do I begin to forbid him? Is it the hanging of the amulet or the abandoning of prayer?
The Shaykh:
This is abandoning prayer. Abandoning prayer entirely is disbelief. I know that his abandonment contains nothing, so what does he have from the Qur'an that is valid, or from shirk (associating partners with Allah)?
The questioner:
One.
The Shaykh:
If it is from the Qur'an, he delays forbidding it because there is scholarly disagreement on it. But if it is from other than the Qur'an, he hastens to forbid it, beginning with that, because shirk is greater than abandoning prayer. So he begins by forbidding the hanging of amulets on the car. Then, if he accepts that, he forbids the abandoning of prayer. Yes.
Source
شرح قرة عيون الموحدين في تحقيق دعوة الأنبياء والمرسلين، باب ما جاء في الرقى والتمائم — islamhouse.com (57:46)
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.