The Sitting Between the Two Prostrations: Where the Prayer Stops to Ask

In most prayers, the sitting between the first prostration and the second lasts under two seconds. Nothing of the Qur’an is recited in it. Nothing is bowed and nothing is prostrated. Whatever attention a worshipper has left tends to be spent on the prostrations either side, and this posture registers as the time the body needs to get from one to the other.

The reports describe something else: a posture carrying the same condition as the prostrations around it, a length that scholars have argued about for centuries, and a set of words in which the worshipper does almost nothing except ask.

A man prayed in the mosque, came and greeted the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), and was sent back — three times — with the same sentence: go back and pray, for you have not prayed. When he finally said that he knew no other way to do it and asked to be taught, what he received was a short sequence of postures with a condition attached to each one. This is how it ends:

ثُمَّ اسْجُدْ حَتَّى تَطْمَئِنَّ سَاجِدًا، ثُمَّ ارْفَعْ حَتَّى تَطْمَئِنَّ جَالِسًا، ثُمَّ اسْجُدْ حَتَّى تَطْمَئِنَّ سَاجِدًا، ثُمَّ افْعَلْ ذَلِكَ فِي صَلَاتِكَ كُلِّهَا

Then prostrate until you are settled in prostration, then rise until you are settled sitting, then prostrate until you are settled in prostration. Then do that throughout the whole of your prayer.

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 1/158 of , hadith 793, narrated from Abū Hurayrah.

Read the three clauses next to each other. The verb is the same in all of them — taṭma’inna, to settle, to come to rest — and it is applied to the sitting in the identical words used for the prostration before it and the prostration after it. Whatever the man had been leaving out, the correction he was given does not treat this sitting as the interval between two acts of worship. It puts it in the list, with the same requirement attached, and then tells him to repeat the whole pattern in every unit of every prayer he prays.

The best-known description of how long the Prophet held each posture comes from al-Barā’ ibn ʿĀzib, and this printing files it under a chapter heading about the pillars of the prayer being balanced and kept light without being cut short:

كَانَتْ صَلَاةُ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ وَرُكُوعُهُ، وَإِذَا رَفَعَ رَأْسَهُ مِنَ الرُّكُوعِ، وَسُجُودُهُ، وَمَا بَيْنَ السَّجْدَتَيْنِ، قَرِيبًا مِنَ السَّوَاءِ

The prayer of the Messenger of Allah — his bowing, his raising his head from the bowing, his prostration, and what came between the two prostrations — was close to equal.

— Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, printed page 1/343 of , hadith 471, narrated from al-Barā’ ibn ʿĀzib.

That report is often quoted as proof that this sitting was long. Strictly, it proves something narrower: that it was proportionate. A prayer in which every posture is equally brief satisfies the wording just as well as one in which every posture is long. What settles the question is a second report, from Ḥudhayfah, describing one specific night on which he watched the Prophet pray and recorded both the length and the words:

ثُمَّ سَجَدَ فَكَانَ سُجُودُهُ نَحْوًا مِنْ قِيَامِهِ، فَكَانَ يَقُولُ فِي سُجُودِهِ: سُبْحَانَ رَبِّيَ الْأَعْلَى، ثُمَّ رَفَعَ رَأْسَهُ مِنَ السُّجُودِ، وَكَانَ يَقْعُدُ فِيمَا بَيْنَ السَّجْدَتَيْنِ نَحْوًا مِنْ سُجُودِهِ، وَكَانَ يَقُولُ: رَبِّ اغْفِرْ لِي، رَبِّ اغْفِرْ لِي

Then he prostrated, and his prostration was about the length of his standing, and he would say in his prostration, “Glory to my Lord, the Most High.” Then he raised his head from the prostration, and he would sit between the two prostrations for about the length of his prostration, and he would say, “My Lord, forgive me. My Lord, forgive me.”

— Sunan Abī Dāwūd, printed page 2/154 of , hadith 874, narrated from Ḥudhayfah; graded a ṣaḥīḥ ḥadīth by the edition’s editor, Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūṭ, who notes that this particular chain runs through Abū Ḥamzah the freedman of the Anṣār and an unnamed man of Banū ʿAbs, and that Muslim records the report through a different route.

The same page says the standing in that unit ran to the whole of Sūrat al-Baqarah. Chain the measurements together and the sitting stops being an abstraction: the prostration was about as long as that standing, and the sitting was about as long as the prostration.

The other thing this page does — and it does it in four lines, without commentary — is show what is said in each posture. The bowing carries “Glory to my Lord, the Magnificent.” The rising from it carries “To my Lord belongs all praise.” The prostration carries “Glory to my Lord, the Most High.” Three postures, three declarations about Allah. Then the worshipper sits, and the only thing narrated on his tongue is a request about himself.

The instinct to hurry through this sitting is not merely modern impatience. There is a real scholarly position that it is meant to be short, and the disagreement is worth naming rather than flattening, because both sides are reading the same reports.

Ibn al-Mulaqqin, a Shāfiʿī jurist who died in 804 AH, works through the hadith on the near-equal postures point by point, and the fifth benefit he draws from it is this: it is evidence that the sitting between the two prostrations is likewise a long pillar — one that may be extended. He then corrects a claim made by some commentators of his own school, that the Shāfiʿīs had never discussed this sitting’s length at all: they did address it, he says, and stated flatly that it is short, whereas what the hadith requires is that it is long, like the straightening up after bowing.

— Al-Iʿlām bi-fawā’id ʿUmdat al-Aḥkām, printed page 3/104 of .

Six centuries later, ʿUbaydullāh al-Mubārakfūrī reads Ḥudhayfah’s report the same way in his commentary on Mishkāt al-Maṣābīḥ: the wording “he would sit between the two prostrations for about the length of his prostration” is, he writes, evidence that this sitting is a long pillar, and a rebuttal of those who held that lengthening it is disliked. He also passes on, by way of al-Shawkānī’s Nayl al-Awṭār, al-Nawawī’s remark that this hadith is difficult to answer.

— Mirʿāt al-Mafātīḥ Sharḥ Mishkāt al-Maṣābīḥ, printed page 4/186 of .

Nothing in either page settles the question for a reader, and this post will not settle it either — the schools genuinely differ on how this posture is classified and on how far it may be drawn out. What both pages establish is narrower and enough: whoever holds that a worshipper may take his time here is not improvising a devotional preference. He is arguing from a narration about how the prayer was actually observed.

Alongside Ḥudhayfah’s two words, a fuller supplication is narrated from Ibn ʿAbbās. The chapter it sits under in this printing is titled, with no ambiguity at all, “the supplication between the two prostrations”:

اللَّهُمَّ اغْفِرْ لِي، وَارْحَمْنِي، وَعَافِنِي، وَاهْدِنِي، وَارْزُقْنِي

O Allah, forgive me, have mercy on me, grant me wellbeing, guide me, and provide for me.

— Sunan Abī Dāwūd, printed page 2/138 of , hadith 850, narrated from Ibn ʿAbbās; the edition’s editor grades the chain ḥasan.

Five requests in nine words, and between them they reach across what a person’s next hour and his eternity both depend on: the past forgiven, mercy over what he cannot repair, health in the body he has to live in, direction for the decisions ahead, and the means to keep going. None of them is decorative, and none of them is a request anyone stops needing.

The collections do not transmit the wording identically. Al-Tirmidhī records the same report through the same chain with a different third request:

اللَّهُمَّ اغْفِرْ لِي وَارْحَمْنِي وَاجْبُرْنِي وَاهْدِنِي وَارْزُقْنِي

O Allah, forgive me, have mercy on me, mend what is broken in me, guide me, and provide for me.

— Sunan al-Tirmidhī, printed page 1/317 of , hadith 284, narrated from Ibn ʿAbbās.

Wa-jburnī — set me right the way a broken bone is set — in place of wa-ʿāfinī, grant me wellbeing. Both are transmitted; neither is a corruption of the other; a worshipper who has heard one wording in his mosque and another on a recording has not caught anyone out. On that same page al-Tirmidhī grades the report gharīb, notes that the like of it is reported from ʿAlī, and records that al-Shāfiʿī, Aḥmad and Isḥāq held saying it permissible in the obligatory prayers as well as the voluntary ones — a note that only exists because somebody had argued it belonged to voluntary prayer alone.

As for Ḥudhayfah’s shorter wording, al-Mubārakfūrī reads the two repetitions in the narration as an indication rather than a count: the point, he writes, is frequent repetition and not specifically twice, and the Prophet would keep repeating the phrase for as long as he remained seated.

It is possible to feel that asking for things is a lesser register than praise — that the strong parts of the prayer are the ones where a servant says something about his Lord, and this sitting is where he lapses into talking about himself. The Qur’an closes that gap directly, and not gently:

وَقَالَ رَبُّكُمُ ٱدْعُونِىٓ أَسْتَجِبْ لَكُمْ ۚ إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ يَسْتَكْبِرُونَ عَنْ عِبَادَتِى سَيَدْخُلُونَ جَهَنَّمَ دَاخِرِينَ

And your Lord has said: call upon Me, I will respond to you. Those who are too proud to worship Me will enter Hell, humiliated.

— Sūrat Ghāfir, 40:60

The command is to ask. The refusal to ask is then described, in the very next clause, as arrogance about worship — which makes the asking a form of it rather than an interruption of it. On that reading, the sitting between the two prostrations is not the prayer pausing before it resumes. It is the part of the prayer where a worshipper does the one thing the verse commands, in the posture that leaves him nothing else to do.

There is a genuine difference over the posture itself, and the sources preserve not only the position but the objection to it. Ṭāwūs and his companions put to Ibn ʿAbbās the practice of iqʿā’ — sitting back with the weight resting on the heels:

قُلْنَا لِابْنِ عَبَّاسٍ فِي الْإِقْعَاءِ عَلَى الْقَدَمَيْنِ، فَقَالَ: هِيَ السُّنَّةُ. فَقُلْنَا لَهُ: إِنَّا لَنَرَاهُ جَفَاءً بِالرَّجُلِ. فَقَالَ ابْنُ عَبَّاسٍ: بَلْ هِيَ سُنَّةُ نَبِيِّكَ

We asked Ibn ʿAbbās about iqʿā’ on the feet, and he said: it is the sunnah. We said to him: we regard it as a hardship for a person. Ibn ʿAbbās said: rather, it is the sunnah of your Prophet.

— Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, printed page 1/380 of , hadith 536, narrated from Ṭāwūs.

A note in this printing — the commentator’s words, not Muslim’s — separates two different things that the one Arabic term covers: a squatting position on the ground with the hands down, which the prohibition addresses, and sitting with the backside on the heels between the two prostrations, which is what it takes Ibn ʿAbbās to have meant. The schools have not converged on which posture is preferable here, and this is not the place to pick one. What is worth taking from the page is the shape of the exchange: an objection was raised on grounds of comfort, and it was answered on grounds of transmission.

Sit up straight after the first prostration, and for the length of that sitting there is no recitation to get through and no next movement to prepare for. There is a request, and permission to repeat it as many times as the sitting lasts. Whatever a person has spent the day doing — the glance he should have lowered, the prayer he let slide past its time, the tone he took with a parent, the money he was not careful about — this is the point in the prayer built to be spent on it: once in every unit, seventeen times across a day of the five obligatory prayers.

Keeping those prayers in their times is the part that has to happen before any of this becomes a question at all. Our prayer times page works out the day’s five times for your own location, names the calculation method behind them, and lets you set the ʿAṣr calculation your own school follows rather than quietly picking one for you — so the appointment is the settled part, and the attention has somewhere to go.

If anything above is wrong — a rendering that misses the Arabic, a page that does not say what we have claimed, a grading stated with more confidence than the source allows — please tell us. Every citation here opens the printed page it came from, and that is exactly so it can be checked against us.

May Allah ﷻ let us sit in that place unhurried, and answer what is asked in it.