The Shaykh’s (may Allah have mercy on him) words on the argument for proxy Hajj

The Shaykh: This is how Tamam asked, regarding acts of worship and obedience. Therefore, it is authentically reported from some of the Salaf, and I think it was 'Abd Allah ibn 'Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with them both), that he said: .
The student : ... .

The Shaykh: 'Abd Allah ibn 'Umar said, Ibn 'Umar said: ; so, does this argument for proxy Hajj not have a basis at all? It may appear so from our previous discussion, but we want to narrow the scope of the argument for proxy Hajj to the limits of the texts that came with this argument. However, I wanted to mention the principle: except for what the text has brought. So let us look at what type or category of people the argument for proxy Hajj came for, and that it is prescribed. The first thing we find from the texts in this regard is the hadith of al-Bukhari regarding that Khath'am woman who asked the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) on the Day of Sacrifice during the Farewell Pilgrimage. She said: "O Messenger of Allah, my father is an old man who cannot stay on the saddle, and the obligation of Allah, Hajj, has overtaken him; should I perform Hajj on his behalf?" He (peace be upon him) said: . This hadith cannot be understood in an absolute sense without the restriction that came within the question, and on the basis of which the answer came. You heard the woman describe the state of her father with attributes, the first of which is that he is an old man. The necessary implication of that is what she said: "he cannot stay on the saddle"; meaning he is unable to ride the camel and continue his journey to the Sacred House of Allah, for he would lean and fall to the ground and die. And the obligation of Allah, Hajj, has overtaken him; meaning: the obligation of Hajj came upon him when it was made obligatory, and he was an old man who could not stay on the saddle. This is because the obligation of Hajj was established in the later part of the life of the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him), according to the most probable of the opinions. And therefore, the Hajj of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) was delayed until the last year of his life. So, a man who is overtaken by the obligation of Hajj while in the prime of his youth, and who has the money, leisure, and energy, and nothing prevents him from hastening to perform Hajj except his preoccupation with his trade, buying and selling for his family and children, and the like of the adornments of this worldly life, has no excuse for delaying Hajj. Then he dies in his middle age, or even as an old man, without having performed the Hajj of Islam at all, and he has no excuse as we mentioned. It may be that he is one of those people who traveled to Europe, to the lands of disbelief and misguidance, repeatedly and again and again, for what purpose? For the purpose of visiting, and for the purpose of expanding his wealth. Then he dies, and he leaves behind a lot of wealth, and one of his children becomes wealthy because of him after his death, and they inherit his wealth. They take out two thousand or six thousand pounds with ease, just as if the poor man took out a dirham. This is a proxy Hajj for our father, from which no one benefits at all. Because the one who performed the proxy Hajj, and the one for whom it was performed, who is the deceased father, has sinned and is an open sinner, unless he died a disbeliever. For Allah (Mighty and Majestic) indicated in the previously mentioned verse by saying: . This one who did not perform Hajj, it is possible to imagine that he did not turn away from Hajj out of disbelief in Hajj, disbelief of the heart, creedal disbelief. It is possible to imagine this, just as we can imagine the same for the one who abandons prayer. And, may Allah protect us, it is possible that he was denying Hajj. And I know some of the young Muslim men... who performed Hajj and then regretted his Hajj. And there is no doubt in his disbelief and his apostasy from his religion, because he found there manifestations of open sinfulness, as the Orientalist books, the enemies of the religion, interpret them as manifestations of polytheism, such as kissing the Black Stone, for example. And he saw the shortcoming of the Muslims due to their ignorance, due to their lack of upbringing, from the gathering of filth and dirt and flies, and so on. So he returned, may Allah protect us, regretting what he had performed of Hajj to the Sacred House of Allah. So this one who died wealthy and did not perform the Hajj of Islam, it is possible to imagine that he is not a disbeliever regarding Hajj, but rather lax in it. So if someone else performs Hajj on his behalf, he does not benefit from this argument. He died, as we said, an open sinner. And Hajj is like prayer; the first intended purpose of it is a trial from Allah for His servants, as He said: . And the intended purpose is the purification of the soul of the one who performs obedience to Allah. So this one died and his soul was not purified by Hajj, because he did not perform Hajj. And his soul was not purified even if all the people performed Hajj on his behalf, because whoever does good, it is for himself. So the argument for proxy Hajj in this form is not prescribed at all. It is not permissible for the pilgrim to take the cost of Hajj if he knows that he is performing Hajj for this type of people, upon whom Hajj was obligatory and they were able to perform it, but they did not do so due to their preoccupation with the world. The Khath'am woman described her husband with attributes. Yes.
The student: Her father.

The Shaykh: She described her father with attributes that excuse this father from not performing Hajj. So whoever is in this state, it is possible to perform Hajj on his behalf. This is one form of the prescribed proxy Hajj. A second form: the same type of person, a person who did not perform Hajj until he was on the verge of death due to an illness that afflicted him, so he regretted his shortcoming and tasked a person to perform Hajj on his behalf and gave him the expenses. So this person performs Hajj on his behalf, because he is making up in the last of his life what he missed. So he is still within the scope of religious obligation, and it is not so after death, as he (peace and blessings be upon him) said: . So this one who bequeathed that Hajj be performed on his behalf, Hajj is performed on his behalf. And this is a type of the prescribed proxy Hajj. And on this basis, the hadith of Ibn 'Abbas is understood. He said: I heard the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) a man responding to the talbiyah, and he was saying: "Labbaik Allahumma 'an Shubrumah." So he (peace and blessings be upon him) said: . He said: "A brother of mine or a relative of mine."
A brother of mine or a relative of mine, so the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) accepted his claim regarding this Shubrumah, but with the wisdom that Allah intended. It has escaped the narrator of this hadith, whether it was Ibn Abbas or someone below him in the chain, to record the exact text of the pilgrim's answer to the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) regarding Shubrumah. This is a point of extreme precision, and I have not found any commentator, nor anyone I have met with whom we have discussed this, who has noticed this point, or rather this subtle point. The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) asked the man, "Who is Shubrumah?" The narration says he replied: أخ لي أو قريب لي A brother of mine," or “a relative of mine.Mishkat al-Masabih 2529 It is not permissible for the one being asked by the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) to answer with this hesitant response. If I were to say to one of you, "I heard so-and-so calling out the talbiyah on behalf of such-and-such, who is he?" and he answered me with this response, "A brother of mine or a relative of mine," I would criticize him and say, "My brother, why are we getting involved in politics to the extent that you conceal the identity of this person from me? Tell me who he is, my brother, specify the answer, because I need to know whether it is permissible for you to perform Hajj on his behalf or not?" Therefore, the answer of the one being asked by the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) must have been very specific, saying, "This is my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister, or any other person." But to say, "He is a brother of mine or a relative of mine," this is not from the one being asked by the Messenger directly; rather, this came from one of the narrators who failed to record the answer issued by the Messenger (peace be upon him). And so, we do not know, and we do not know, for a wisdom that Allah (Mighty and Majestic) intended, the identity of this person who is Shubrumah. However, the rules of the Shari'ah prevent a questioner from asking, or a speaker from saying, "So there is something here that has been lost from the Muslims." We say, "No," because the secondary issues are not something a person can encompass with knowledge, especially these secondary issues in which the later scholars from the various schools of jurisprudence have expanded, so they are in the thousands, if not millions. It is not possible for a person to encompass them, but rather they are encompassed by those foundational legal principles, some of which our Lord (Mighty and Majestic) specified in His Book, and our Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) in his Sunnah, and the rest were derived by the scholars. So here, we do not know the identity of this person, so we assume that he was like the father of that Khath'amian woman who was unable to perform Hajj, so she performed Hajj on his behalf. We assume that he bequeathed that Hajj be performed on his behalf. If we assume he was occupied with trade or his wealth, this is difficult to imagine in the time of Prophethood and the Message, just as it is extremely difficult to imagine that there was someone in the time of the Messenger (peace be upon him) who left off prayer, because that time was the purest time that has ever existed on the face of the earth, absolutely. So do we imagine a person who leaves off prayer in the time of the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him), and then imagine that there must be a process of dropping the prayer as the later scholars do, or someone who intentionally and deliberately left off Hajj, so we perform a substitute Hajj on his behalf as they also do today? This is very difficult to imagine. Therefore, we imagine the condition accompanied by an excuse, which is that father who was unable to perform Hajj. Shubrumah may have been like him, or he may have been unable to perform Hajj in the first year or the second year, and then illness struck him, so he remedied the matter by appointing a relative to perform Hajj on his behalf. So, and this is the crux of the speech, the scope of the substitute Hajj is very narrow. So I hope that some of our brothers do not get entangled, and that his Hajj to the House of Allah the Sacred and his prayer in the mosque of the Messenger (peace be upon him) does not tempt him to consider that an excuse to perform a substitute Hajj on behalf of any person whatsoever. This is not permissible. Rather, he must clarify. If he finds that the person for whom Hajj is being performed is of one of the two previous categories, then this is a bounty, and I advise him to seize it, may Allah (Blessed and Exalted is He) grant it to him. But otherwise, it is not permissible to perform Hajj on his behalf, because no one performs Hajj on behalf of another except what the evidence indicates. And we have known that there are two types. Then he performs Hajj on his behalf just as he performs it for himself, without being lenient. He should observe, for example, that the Hajj is not for himself, so let me perform the Hajj for him with the minimum? What is valid for Hajj? With what is Hajj valid? For example, if it is an Ifrad Hajj, then he performs an Ifrad Hajj on his behalf, meaning he does not bring an Umrah for him, so he would have fallen short in the obligatory and contradicted the previous hadith: دخلت العمرة في الحج إلى يوم القيامة Umrah has been entered into Hajj until the Day of Resurrection.Jami` at-Tirmidhi 932. Then, he did not fulfill the right of the price he received for his Hajj. This is what I wanted to remind you of on the occasion of Hajj to the House of Allah the Sacred: that the pilgrim should make his Hajj a Tamattu' Hajj, not an Ifrad Hajj, and also not make it a Qiran Hajj, even though the Qiran Hajj includes Umrah, because Qiran is the combination of Umrah and Hajj. But the Qiran Hajj does not have this separation between Umrah and Hajj which is the Tamattu' mentioned in the Qur'an فَمَنْ تَمَتَّعَ بِالْعُمْرَةِ إِلَى الْحَجِّ فَمَا اسْتَيْسَرَ مِنَ الْهَدْيِ then whoever performs 'umrah [during the Hajj months] followed by Hajj [offers] what can be obtained with ease of sacrificial animals[Al-Baqarah 2:196]. Qiran meets Tamattu' in one aspect and differs from it in another aspect. It meets it in the combination of Hajj and Umrah, and it meets it in that it is necessary to have a sacrificial animal. But it differs from Tamattu' in that the Umrah and Hajj are linked together, so the process is an Ifrad Hajj process, and the intention is only the intention of Umrah and Hajj. Since there is some difficulty and hardship in Qiran, and Allah (Mighty and Majestic), as He said: يُرِيدُ اللَّهُ بِكُمُ الْيُسْرَ وَلَا يُرِيدُ بِكُمُ الْعُسْرَ Allah intends for you ease and does not intend for you hardship[Al-Baqarah 2:185], He said (peace and blessings be upon him): لو استقبلتُ من أمري ما استدبرت لَمَا سقْتُ الهدى ، ولَجعلتُها عمرة If I had known beforehand about my affair what I have come to know later, I would not have brought the sacrificial animals with meSunan Abi Dawud 1784; meaning an Umrah of Tamattu'. This is because the Prophet's (peace and blessings be upon him) Hajj was a Qiran, but he had brought the sacrificial animals, and many of his Companions who performed Hajj with him were also doing Qiran like him. However, these people doing Qiran were of two types: some of them, and they were the minority, brought the sacrificial animals as the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) brought them from Dhul-Hulayfah, and the others, and they were the majority, did not bring the sacrificial animals; they intended Qiran, but did not bring the sacrificial animals. So he (peace and blessings be upon him) ordered these people doing Qiran, in addition to those doing Ifrad, because they did not bring the sacrificial animals, to dissolve their Qiran and their Ifrad Hajj into an Umrah. And when they hesitated at first, he said: لو استقبلتُ من أمري ما استدبرت لَمَا سُقْتُ الهديَ ، ولَجَعَلْتُها عمرة If I had known beforehand about my affair what I have come to know later, I would not have brought the sacrificial animals with meSunan Abi Dawud 1784; meaning he encouraged them to dissolve their Hajj and Qiran into an Umrah, and he consoled them by saying: لولا أني سقت الهديَ لَفَعَلْتُ مثل ما آمركم به Had I not brought the Hadi with me, I would have done the sameSahih al-Bukhari 1568. Therefore, we do not advise anyone to perform a Qiran Hajj, even though it includes Umrah, and even though it fulfills his saying (peace and blessings be upon him): دخلت العمرة في الحج إلى يوم القيامة Umrah has been entered into Hajj until the Day of Resurrection.Jami` at-Tirmidhi 932, except that in it, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) ordered those who performed a Qiran Hajj and did not bring the sacrificial animals to dissolve their Hajj and Qiran into an Umrah. So if we imagine now a person who represents the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) completely, like Abu Bakr and other Companions, seeing a man who performed a Qiran Hajj and did not bring the sacrificial animals, what do you think he would say to him? He would say to him as he said.