A word about the lines in the Sacred Mosque.

The Shaykh : Here I must remind you of a very, very, very important matter, which is that the prayers of many pilgrims are invalid because in the Sacred Mosque they deviate from the Ka'bah, and the Ka'bah is right before their eyes. We do not say that, for example, the one who is at al-Marwah and the prayer is established there prays there; he may be deviating to the right or to the left, and his ruling in that case is like our ruling when we pray outside the mosques: we do our best. But most of the worshippers see the Ka'bah and do not face it because of their negligence, their ignorance, and the engineering error in these new buildings built today. I used to see that, if you saw the black line connected to the Black Stone corner, the Black Stone corner, extended here with black tiles, that was a good thing so that the one from Ta'if would not pass by without at least starting with the marker for the Black Stone corner. I used to think that the massive renovations that cost them millions should have the tiles laid with curved lines so that the one who stands there at the end of the line or here does not deviate from facing the qiblah. People, without a doubt, do not have a thought or a plan for building an ordinary mosque, let alone building and renovating the Sacred Mosque, especially above the first floor; the tiles are laid as usual and do not have these lines. The lines that are extended now in the mosques, these lines, I consider them to be a religious innovation because they lead to the neglect of organizing the rows and caring for straightening the rows, and so on. But in the Sacred Mosque, I see such lines to be among the unlegislated public benefits, because there, it is not possible to align these tiles so that whoever stands in any place of this row finds himself facing the Ka'bah without such a physical constraint. So we find the worshippers in front of me, for example, a row: he prays like this, and I like this, and the Ka'bah is like this, and we have often done this, and perhaps some of our brothers present can come, we take one, we do it like this, and you find them like a cast concrete pillar, a poured concrete pillar. And I did this in my last 'Umrah.
Abu Layla : ... .

The Shaykh : You were with me.
Abu Layla : Yes, my Shaykh.

The Shaykh : This is due to a jurisprudential deviation, because in the Hanafi school, if it is said to the worshipper, "You are facing the opposite of the Ka'bah, and the Ka'bah is like this," and he turns, for example, to the right, if you respond to this speech, your prayer is invalid. They consider this a conversation, and they even narrated a hadith on that, reported in Sunan Abu Dawud, that speech that is understood by the worshipper invalidates the prayer. And in its chain is an unknown man, and praise be to Allah. The point is, we tried to face the direction of the Sacred Mosque, absolutely like concrete. After he had prayed, with people around him, we said to him, "My brother, this man is praying not facing the Ka'bah," and we said to him and pointed to him, but he did not respond. He said he was Indian or Pakistani. By Allah, I forgot what he said!
Abu Layla : From the side of Sudan, an African, Shaykh.

The Shaykh : Not Afghan, meaning what is his situation now? You are now affected because that Afghan entered ihram from Afghanistan.