Prayer Concession: What Constitutes Travel
Adil Salahi, Arab News
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=5§ion=0&article=67004&d=15&m=7&y=2005&pix=islam.jpg&category=Islam
Question
I travel to work a distance of about 50 miles, staying at my place of work from Monday to Friday, and go back for the weekend. May I ask whether this distance counts as travel that permits shortening my prayer? Do I treat my stay at work as travel that gives me the concessions associated with traveling?
Answer
Scholars mention a certain distance for travel that justifies using the concessions God has given us in prayer and fasting. The distance varies a little, but the figure quoted in most cases is 80 km, with some people adding or taking away a few kilometers. But the view that is more valid in this respect does not rely on distance, but on social custom. It is what people consider to be travel, rather than the distance or the time it takes to cover that distance. Today, if you live on the outskirts of Jeddah, in the direction of Makkah, you can reach Makkah by car in less time than you can reach the other end of Jeddah. Yet if you go to Makkah you are deemed to be a traveler, while if you go to the other side of Jeddah, you are not. If you take a flight to Madinah, you arrive there in less time than it needs for either of the two journeys mentioned, although the distance is much longer. Yet while no one suggests
that going from one end of Jeddah to the other constitutes travel, and a strict person may argue that the Jeddah-Makkah trip does not either, no one disputes that the Madinah trip is true travel. Yet it may be the most comfortable of the three journeys.
Thus, it is not so much the distance, but the general acceptance of society of what constitutes travel. Before the advent of the age of fast transport, a journey to another town at 25 kilometers distance was universally considered to constitute travel. Today, this would be a short trip that justifies neither shortening prayer nor breaking ones fast. Therefore, the reader is the best to know whether his trip to his place of work constitutes travel or not.
If it does, there remains the question of the regularity of the travel, and where he is considered to be a traveler and where he is resident. The answer to this question is where he normally considers himself to be at home. If at the place he spends the weekends he has a home, where his wife and children live, then this is where he resides, and his trips to work are travel. So, he shortens his prayers when he travels to work. On the other hand, if he simply spends his weekends in the city because of the variety it offers, staying with friends, rather than in his own home, then he is a traveler when he is in the city and a resident where he works. He should look at the situation and make his own decision.
AB
"For to us will be their return; then it will be for us to call them to account." (Holy Quran 88:25-26)
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