Noon, Afternoon, Evening and Night Prayers.

Noon, Afternoon, Evening and Night Prayers. The fifth prayer is included in “وقرآن الفجر”, meaning perform the Morning Prayer. Therefore, these are the five prayers Allah has considered obligatory for His Prophet and the ummah. If we regard duluk as meaning the sunset, the verse will refer only to three prayers.[^6] In Arabic, دلوك means ‘declining,’ that is when the sun passes the longitude and when it rises or sets, because in sunrise and sunset, the sunlight declines, too.

In (the book entitled) Nawadir Al-I’rab too, the word means the height of the sun. Mubarrid has also confirmed that duluk refers to the inclination of the sun toward west up to sunset.[^7] As a result, even though duluk may mean the setting of the sun, in this honorable verse, the most suitable meaning is the declining of the sun from the center of the sky.

Beside what was narrated from Azhari and others in proving this meaning, various other traditions have also been narrated in this regard, two of which we bring here: عِن ابنِ مِسعود رصي الله عنه قال: قالَ رَسولُ الله صلّى اللهُ عليهِ وسلَّم : أتاني جِبرئِيلُ عَليهِ السَّلامُ لِدُلوكِ الشَّمسِ حِينَ زالَتْ فَصَلّى بِيَ الظُّهْرَ.

‘Declining of the sun’ is its inclination toward the west and ‘the darkness of the night’ is the middle of the night and ‘Qur’an Al-Fajr’ is the two-unit Morning Prayer.[^8] With regard to these various traditions, we cannot regard the two traditions narrated by Suyuti from Ibn Mas’ud and Ali (a.s), implying that duluk means the sunset. Furthermore, these two types of traditions are in contrast.

Supposing that the first group of traditions are not preferable and the invalidity of both types is proven, it undoubtedly becomes clear that we should refer to the Holy Qur’an’s lexical level, which made it obvious that duluk in the honorable verse means declining of the sun.