Be-waqt Hajj

The question is put in his own words on the first page: if the moon was not sighted, and the Hajj was performed a day before the qadi’s ruling, is the Hajj discharged or not, is the obligation fulfilled or not, or must Hajj be done again?

The answer, headed الجواب, is that the Hajj stands and does not have to be repeated, and he gives two reasons.

The first is that the matter of Hajj is in the qadi’s hands. Once the qadi has ruled, it becomes permissible for the people to act on that ruling, even where the ruling itself came a day late.

The second is the one the piece really rests on, and it is an argument from hardship rather than from the calendar. Hajj can only be done on its own day and in its own place: it is the ninth of Dhul Hijjah, and it is at ʿArafāt, and there is no Hajj anywhere or any time else. So if such a Hajj were declared not to have counted, then hundreds of thousands of people who had travelled from far away would have to come again the following year. That, he says, is ḥaraj ʿaẓīm. On the ground of that hardship the ruling has to be that the Hajj is discharged and no fatwa is given requiring it to be done again. That is the principle of the sharīʿah, and it is where he leaves it.

The moon-sighting question underneath it is the subject of Ittihad-e-Matla, and the argument against fixing Ramadan and Eid by calculation is Hisab par Ramadan Karna.