If the leader orders to perform the ritual prayers and fast in Ramadhan...

If the leader orders to perform the ritual prayers and fast in Ramadhan, such orders are called directive obligations. Extended And Constricted Obligations An extended obligation is an action that can be done in an extended period, and the duty-bound person can for example perform it in the beginning, middle, or at the end of its time, such as the Midday Prayers the time of whose performance extends to sunset.

A constricted obligation is an action that must be done in a short or fixed period, such as fasting on each day of Ramadhan, which must be performed from sunrise to sunset and cannot be observed either earlier or later. Another example is the Friday prayer that must be performed at exactly midday in a very limited time.

Urgent And Non-Urgent Obligations An urgent obligation is an action that must be performed immediately without delay, such as answering to a form of ritual greeting, performing the ritual Alarm Prayer ( salat ayat ) immediately after an earthquake, or paying back debts when their due time has arrived and the lender requests for repayment.

Non-urgent obligations are actions the performance of which is not immediately necessary, such as making up for missed prayers or paying back a debt whose owner has not determined a certain time for repayment. Primary And Subordinate Obligations It is forbidden to refrain from carrying out any action that the law of Islam deems obligatory and consequently proscribes abstaining from it. Such an action is a primary obligation, while to refrain from carrying it out is a subordinate prohibition.

In this way, every primary obligation necessitates a subordinate prohibition and every primary prohibition necessitates a subordinate obligation. For this reason, subordinate obligations and prohibitions are sometimes mentioned in this book. For example, it was said that drinking wine is forbidden and refraining from it is obligatory, or that defrayment of the zakat tax is obligatory and refraining from defraying it is forbidden.

Subordinate prohibitions and obligations are also used in other cases. If studied carefully, the prohibitions of the religious law can be also classified into most of the divisions of obligations; nevertheless, they are few in kind and rarely mentioned in books of master jurisprudents. Therefore, I have disregarded referring to these divisions.