Mark of the Jurist - Qawaidul Fiqh 101

I attended this course yesterday and today. Its not an Usl Fiqh course, it’s a course on how to apply the rules of fiqh in our daily lives. We also learned how scholars derived a fatwa, but that doesn’t mean coming out of this class we will be able to issue a fatwa by ourselves, :P

I am sharing today a simple enough guideline that clarifies certain things and perhaps can increase our quality of ibadah…InsyaAllah… :D

This is only a sub to one particular rule of fiqh, Rule no 1: All affairs are by their intention.
I guess we are all familiar with the famous hadeeth,  “Verily all affairs are by its intention and indeed for every person is what he intended ” [Hadeeth Al-Bukhari]

And the sub-topic is interjoining intentions (2 or more intentions together). In our daily actions, there are few categories:
C1: any obligatory action
C2: every non-obligatory action that must be done on its own
C3: any non-obligatory action that does not need to be done on its own.
Let’s be a bit specific:

And based on these categories, the rulings of combining intention are as follows:

So how do we apply the matrix?

Say for example, Fajr prayer is 2 rakaat, must only be done on its own. If you want to perform 2 rakaat of the the Nafl (solat sunat) before Fajr, in total you have to do 4 rakaat.

That is clear, but what we don’t know is, the category 2 and 3 can be combined in one occasion. For example, for a guy who prays at masjid, when he enters the masjid, he can combines the intention for 2 rakaat tahiyatul masjid and 2 rakaat of Nafl and only conduct a 2 rakaat prayer, but he gains both for tahiyatul masjid and the Nafl.

So lets have a look at another example, that is closer to women.  Due to menstruation, we rarely get to complete the 30 days in Ramadhan, there has always been a dispute year after year on whether or not can we combine the Qada and the 6 days of Shawwal. There is a lot of opinions, but what I learned today put things into perspective. Since Qada is category C1, and the 6 days of Shawwal is C2, then it cannot be combined.

I have listened to both opinions about allowing it and vice versa, and I took the one that is convenient to me, but now I have different opinion. May Allah forgive me for my ignorance before.

Ok akhi and ukhti, that’s it for now. The rest of the theoretical part of rules and principles of fiqh are pretty hard to explain so I would not venture into that. :D