In the name of God, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.
Continuation on the Sections concerning Friday Prayer
Section, or Rather Continuation, on the Disagreement over Its Obligation
The scholars disagree about whether Friday prayer is obligatory. Some hold that it is an individual obligation. Others hold that it is a communal obligation. Others hold that it is a Sunna.
Continuation on the Inward Application
(Friday Prayer and the Unity of Multiplicity)
This prayer has no foothold in the affirmation of the oneness of the Essence, nor does it bear fruit in the state of the person who knows that oneness and acts in accordance with it. It affords knowledge of the unity of multiplicity[1]. The same applies to someone who holds that the Essence in itself required the existence of the world. This knowledge does not yield what comes from God upon the servant’s heart or what is received in His self-disclosure in this prayer, for in its existence and reality this prayer is founded on more than one.
It belongs to the presence of the divine names. It cannot validly be performed by a person alone, whereas all other prayers can validly be performed by a person alone.
Thus each prayer apart from Friday prayer affords what Friday prayer affords insofar as it is
Notes
[1]
(Here the unity of multiplicity is a unity intelligible alongside a plurality of relations and names. The author contrasts it with the oneness of the Essence, which is not derived from a relation to the world.)
Translator’s note TN1897-1: “Unity of multiplicity” renders aḥadiyyat al-kathrah, the unity disclosed through multiple relations and divine names. The Arabic clause about what comes upon the heart is compressed. The translation reads it as distinguishing the kind of knowledge described here from what the servant receives in his state.
