How to reconcile the command to pray the Fajr prayer at the beginning of its time with the encouragement to delay the Fajr prayer until the time of darkness.

The questioner : How do we reconcile this command, which is to pray before or after the dawn breaks?

The Shaykh : It seems to me that you find a contradiction... but I fear that this is of the type where one is speaking about someone else, so that we do not wrong people. So, did you say this yourself, or from whom did you quote it?

The questioner : No, from the one we quoted from.

The Shaykh : Did you say it, or from whom did you quote it? He thinks that there is no prayer in the darkness until the light appears in the east. There is no contradiction, because when the light appears in the east... it is in darkness. And darkness is relative; the darkness is before the darkness, and the darkness is after the darkness of the darkness, and so on. Then something came to my mind when we discussed the topic: what do the scholars say? "What is adjacent to a thing takes its ruling." So this darkness, considering that it is after the Fajr adhan, considering that the darkness I named is not known from the perspective of... the darkness of the darkness is called darkness by virtue of adjacency. Therefore, the Muslim who wants to understand the religion of Allah (Mighty and Majestic) always tries to reconcile the texts and does not strike one text with another. And as I said earlier to this brother, the scholars agreed that the saying of Allah the Exalted is a ruling that is established and decreed until the Day of Resurrection, clear and not abrogated; they all agreed on this. Then they agreed that the time of Fajr is only as Allah the Exalted said and so on. So this should be...The questioner : ...or that, how is this, while we pray in the darkness? Do you understand now? The Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) used to pray in the darkness. He is the one to whom these two verses were revealed. So either you understand darkness in a relative sense, or by virtue of adjacency as we said. The intense darkness is before the dawn breaks. So when the dawn breaks, it is said: "Pray in the darkness," meaning during the darkness, relatively. This is the answer.