Reflections
The Words We Say for the Ten Days, and Who First Said Them
Say "Allāhu akbar" during these ten days and you are quoting someone — usually a Companion, rarely the same one twice. The sources are unusually candid about whose words these actually are.
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- The Quran Gallery team
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Say Allāhu akbar during these ten days and, technically, you are quoting someone. Not always the same someone. Ask five people leaving five different mosques what they said after the prayer and you may get five different sentences — all of them takbīr, all of them said with a straight face as “the” wording, and almost none of them a report from the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) directly. You do not need to be standing anywhere near Minā to notice this. It is audible from any street with a mosque on it.
That gap between the practice and its source is not something the sources try to hide.
وَقَدْ رَوَاهُ الْبَيْهَقِيُّ عَنْ أَصْحَابِ ابْنِ مَسْعُودٍ، وَلَمْ يَثْبُتْ فِي شَيْءٍ مِنْ ذَلِكَ عَنِ النَّبِيِّ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ حَدِيثٌ، وَأَصَحُّ مَا وَرَدَ فِيهِ عَنِ الصَّحَابَةِ قَوْلُ عَلِيٍّ، وَابْنِ مَسْعُودٍ أَنَّهُ مِنْ صُبْحِ يَوْمِ عَرَفَةَ آخِرِ أَيَّامِ مِنًى أَخْرَجَهُ ابْنُ الْمُنْذِرِ وَغَيْرُهُ وَاللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ Al-Bayhaqī related this from the companions of Ibn Masʿūd, and no ḥadīth is established from the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) on any of it. The soundest report transmitted from the Companions is the statement of ʿAlī and Ibn Masʿūd — that it runs from the morning of the Day of ʿArafah to the last of the days at Minā — reported by Ibn al-Mundhir and others. And Allah knows best.
— Fatḥ al-Bārī, printed page 2/462 of .
Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī is not being modest there. He means it as a finding: the takbīr said during these days — both when it is said and, further down the same page, what exact sentence is said — comes down to us as the practice of Companions, graded against each other, not as a saying of the Prophet himself. That is worth sitting with before looking at the wordings themselves, because it changes what the wordings are. They are not competing memories of one lost original. They are separate answers, from separate people, to the same open question — and the record kept all of them on purpose.
Before the words, the timing — because the two questions get confused with each other and the confusion is not entirely accidental. Scholars describe two kinds of takbīr for these days. Unrestricted takbīr (muṭlaq) can be said at any moment, day or night, through the span of the ten days and the days that follow — in a house, in a market, on a phone call. Restricted takbīr (muqayyad) is tied to the five daily prayers, said once after each one finishes, and it is this second kind whose edges the schools have never agreed on.
Ibn Ḥajar lists the disagreement rather than settling it, on the same page already cited. Some hold restricted takbīr begins at the dawn prayer of ʿArafah; some at its noon prayer; some at its afternoon prayer; some only from the dawn prayer of the Day of Sacrifice; some from its noon prayer. And it ends, on various accounts, anywhere from the noon prayer of the Day of Sacrifice itself to the dawn, the noon, or the afternoon prayer of the last of the Days of Tashrīq — printed page 2/462 of again, where Ibn Ḥajar credits nearly the whole list to al-Nawawī’s own survey of the question. Nobody in that list is called wrong. A worshipper who starts on the morning of ʿArafah and one who starts at noon on the Day of Sacrifice are both following a school, not improvising.
The variety in the sentence itself is at least as old as the variety in its timing, and one classical author happened to write both down side by side. Ibn al-Mundhir — a jurist of the third Islamic century — devotes a short chapter of al-Awsaṭ to exactly this question, and lays out four positions in a row, each with its own name attached.
The first he brings by three separate chains, from three different Companions saying the identical sentence:
الله أكبر الله أكبر لا إله إلا الله والله أكبر الله أكبر ولله الحمد Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest. There is no god but Allah. And Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest, and to Allah belongs all praise.
— al-Awsaṭ, printed page 4/349 of , reported there from ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, from Ibn Masʿūd through al-Aswad, and separately from ʿAlī through ʿĀṣim ibn Ḍamrah. Ibn al-Mundhir names al-Nakhaʿī, al-Thawrī, Aḥmad, Isḥāq, Abū Ḥanīfah and al-Shaybānī as holding this wording after him.
The second position on his list is the shortest sentence anyone reports:
الله أكبر الله أكبر الله أكبر Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest.
— al-Awsaṭ, printed page 4/350 of , which Ibn al-Mundhir attributes to Mālik and al-Shāfiʿī as a school position, adding that al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī held it too. No chain is offered for this one on the page — it is recorded as a known practice, not traced hadith by hadith the way the first was.
Third, from Ibn ʿAbbās, by way of ʿIkrimah:
الله أكبر الله أكبر كبيرا الله أكبر تكبيرا الله أكبر وأجل الله أكبر ولله الحمد Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest — greatly. Allah is greatest, magnified truly. Allah is greatest and most exalted. Allah is greatest, and to Allah belongs all praise.
— al-Awsaṭ, printed page 4/350 of . The same page’s own footnote flags that other transmissions from Ibn ʿAbbās, through the same ʿIkrimah, close the sentence differently — one drops the final “wa lillāhi al-ḥamd” for “Allāhu akbar ʿalā mā hadānā”, Allah is greatest for having guided us. The outline is stable; a clause at the end moves.
And fourth, from Ibn ʿUmar, with no chain given beyond “we have transmitted this from him”:
الله أكبر الله أكبر الله أكبر لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له له الملك وله الحمد وهو على كل شيء قدير Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest. There is no god but Allah, alone, without partner. His is the dominion, and His is all praise, and He has power over all things.
— al-Awsaṭ, printed page 4/350 of . This is the longest of the four, and the only one that folds a full declaration of tawḥīd into the takbīr rather than stopping at praise.
Ibn Ḥajar, writing centuries after Ibn al-Mundhir, picks up the same question and does something the others mostly do not: he ranks the wordings rather than just listing them.
وَأَمَّا صِيغَةُ التَّكْبِيرِ فَأَصَحُّ مَا وَرَدَ فِيهِ مَا أَخْرَجَهُ عَبْدُ الرَّزَّاقِ بِسَنَدٍ صَحِيحٍ عَنْ سَلْمَانَ قَالَ: كَبِّرُوا اللَّهَ، اللَّهُ أَكْبَرُ اللَّهُ أَكْبَرُ، اللَّهُ أَكْبَرُ كَبِيرًا، وَنُقِلَ عَنْ سَعِيدِ بْنِ جُبَيْرٍ، وَمُجَاهِدٍ، وَعَبْدِ الرَّحْمَنِ بْنِ أَبِي لَيْلَى، أَخْرَجَهُ جَعْفَرٌ الْفِرْيَابِيُّ فِي كِتَابِ الْعِيدَيْنِ مِنْ طَرِيقِ يَزِيدَ بْنِ أَبِي زِيَادٍ عَنْهُمْ، وَهُوَ قَوْلُ الشَّافِعِيِّ وَزَادَ: وَلِلَّهِ الْحَمْدُ As for the wording of the takbīr, the soundest report on it is what ʿAbd al-Razzāq related with a sound chain from Salmān, who said: “Magnify Allah with takbīr — Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest, Allah is greatest, greatly.” The same is transmitted from Saʿīd ibn Jubayr, Mujāhid, and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī Laylā — related by Jaʿfar al-Firyābī in Kitāb al-ʿĪdayn through Yazīd ibn Abī Ziyād from them — and it is the position of al-Shāfiʿī, who added: “and to Allah belongs all praise.”
— Fatḥ al-Bārī, printed page 2/462 of .
Read that carefully and it says something more precise than “this is the best one.” It says: of everything transmitted on this exact question, this chain — Salmān, by way of ʿAbd al-Razzāq — is the soundest isnād, and a wording close to his was independently kept by three of the early Successors, Saʿīd ibn Jubayr among them, until al-Shāfiʿī’s school took it up with one word added. A soundly transmitted report and a widely adopted legal position are two different kinds of strength, and Ibn Ḥajar hands the reader both without pretending they are the same thing.
Underneath all five wordings sits one verse that none of them quote directly, but that every one of them is answering:
لَن يَنَالَ ٱللَّهَ لُحُومُهَا وَلَا دِمَآؤُهَا وَلَـٰكِن يَنَالُهُ ٱلتَّقْوَىٰ مِنكُمْ ۚ كَذَٰلِكَ سَخَّرَهَا لَكُمْ لِتُكَبِّرُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ عَلَىٰ مَا هَدَىٰكُمْ ۗ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلْمُحْسِنِينَ Their meat will never reach Allah, nor will their blood, but what reaches Him is piety from you. Thus has He subjected them to you, that you may glorify Him for having guided you. So give good news to those who do good.
The verse names the reason, not the sentence. It tells the reader to magnify Allah for having guided them; it does not hand them the words to do it in. That gap is exactly where Ibn Masʿūd, Ibn ʿAbbās, Salmān and the rest step in — each supplying an answer the revelation itself left open, which is a different thing from each of them supplying the answer.
None of this is a puzzle to be solved by finding the “real” one. A pilgrim standing at ʿArafah and a person at their desk on the ninth of Dhū al-Ḥijjah are reaching for the same handful of sentences, kept correct by scholars who cared enough to record who first said which one and how sure the chain back to them really is. Any one of the five above is a defensible choice. What is not defensible is saying it with more certainty about its origin than the sources themselves claim.
If anything above is wrong — a wording misquoted, a chain misread, a grading pushed further than the page allows — tell us. We would rather be corrected than left standing.
May Allah ﷻ accept the takbīr of everyone who says it these ten days, however they learned the words, and however many of them they know.