Request for the Shaykh to advise them.

The questioner : What advice do you give us, O Shaykh, meaning, finally, after this pleasant session, if Allah wills?

The Shaykh : May Allah make you well. I advise you, as I have mentioned more than once to some of the enthusiastic young men here regarding going there, to be careful to uphold the rulings of the Shari'ah during your stay there in your own lands, let alone during your stay in foreign lands. For many people—I have said this and I continue to say it—go to Hajj to the House of Allah, which is an individual obligation, and may Allah have mercy on you, and it is an individual obligation once in a lifetime, as you know. Yet many of them, on their way to Hajj or on their return from Hajj, fall into violations of the Shari'ah that nullify their work. They may neglect the prayer on the way there and back, and they may make excuses or find reasons for themselves for leaving off the prayer. So do these people return as winners or as losers? These pilgrims who go to perform the individual obligation of Hajj, and yet they neglect the individual obligations of prayer and other than prayer. We have often heard that some of these pilgrims, due to their poor upbringing, may curse the religion of their Muslim brother, or may curse their Lord, and so on. So this person returns from Hajj with empty sandals, as the old Arabic proverb says. Indeed, as that Bedouin said to someone like this, he said: "And I did not perform Hajj, but the camels performed Hajj." So my advice to you and to all the Muslim young men who are there or who go there is to be careful not to neglect any of the other individual obligations or the other duties. For example, you must have heard of a prayer in the books of Islamic jurisprudence called the prayer of fear, and there is another prayer called the prayer of severe fear, and some of them used to call it the prayer of sword-fighting. Do you know, and it is certainly clear what sword-fighting means! That is, engaging and clashing with the disbelievers. Even in this state, it is not permissible for a Muslim to neglect any of the five prayers. But our Lord (Mighty and Majestic) eases things for His servants and facilitates for them the performance of what He has made obligatory upon them, so some of what was obligatory upon them is dropped. As you know, regarding the prayer of travel, it is shortened. But the prayer of fear is the shortening of the shortening, meaning the four-unit prayer in travel becomes two units, and this two-unit prayer, due to fear and fighting, becomes one unit. I think this is known to you. But if the two armies engage, then there is no bowing and no prostration; it is only the takbir and a gesture with the head. Why did our Lord (Mighty and Majestic) facilitate this ease for His servants in a state of severe fear? And so that the Muslim does not become heedless of his Lord and of his worship, even in the hour of hardship. And if the matter is thus, then all the more so if you are, for example, dealing with a matter, each of you according to his specialty, and the time for prayer catches up with you, then that matter should not distract you from performing the prayer, for example, in its time. Thus, the Muslim must be with Allah (Mighty and Majestic) in his presence to His obedience and worship, even in the most critical of times. This is what comes to my mind now.