The Days of Tashrīq: A Name Nobody Agrees On, and a Fast Nobody Is Allowed to Keep

For most of the world’s Muslims, ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā ends the way it began: an ordinary day follows it. No flight to catch, no valley of tents, no jamarāt to walk to. But the calendar does not stop working the moment the sacrifice is made. Three more days follow it — the 11th, 12th and 13th of Dhū al-Ḥijjah — and the sources treat them as carrying real weight of their own, whether or not anyone reading this ever goes to Minā.

They are called the Days of Tashrīq. What that word means, why fasting is the one thing forbidden on all three of them, and how long the sacrifice itself stays valid, are questions with answers on paper — and the paper does not always agree with itself.

The earliest classification of these three days is not philological. It is a designation, and it comes with a description attached:

يَوْمُ عَرَفَةَ، وَيَوْمُ النَّحْرِ، وَأَيَّامُ التَّشْرِيقِ عِيدُنَا أَهْلَ الْإِسْلَامِ، وَهِيَ أَيَّامُ أَكْلٍ وَشُرْبٍ

The Day of ʿArafah, the Day of Naḥr, and the Days of Tashrīq are our ʿĪd, the people of Islam — and they are days of eating and drinking.

— Sunan Abī Dāwūd, printed page 4/88 of , hadith 2419, narrated from ʿUqbah b. ʿĀmir. The edition’s editors grade the chain ṣaḥīḥ in their footnote.

Notice what the hadith does before it says anything about eating: it puts three consecutive days under one label, ʿĪd, and the three are not identical in kind. ʿArafah is a standing. Naḥr is a sacrifice. Tashrīq is neither — and it still gets folded into the same festival. Whatever a person at home does on these three days, the classification the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) gave them settles the register they belong to before any specific rule is stated.

Ask why these three days are called tashrīq specifically, and the philologists do not converge on an answer. Ibn Manẓūr collects the disagreement in one entry of Lisān al-ʿArab, attributing each explanation to the scholar who held it rather than picking one:

وتَشْريق اللَّحْمِ: تَقْطِيعُه وتقدِيدُه وبَسْطُه، وَمِنْهُ سُمِّيَتْ أَيَّامُ التَّشْرِيقِ. وَأَيَّامُ التَّشْرِيقِ: ثَلَاثَةُ أَيام بَعْدَ يَوْمِ النَّحْرِ لأَن لَحْمَ الأَضاحي يُشَرَّق فِيهَا لِلشَّمْسِ أَي يُشَرَّر، وَقِيلَ: سُمِّيَتْ بِذَلِكَ لأَنهم كَانُوا يَقُولُونَ فِي الْجَاهِلِيَّةِ: أَشْرِقْ ثَبِير كَيْمَا نُغِير … وَقَالَ ابْنُ الأَعرابي: سُمِّيَتْ بِذَلِكَ لأَن الهَدْيَ وَالضَّحَايَا لَا تُنْحَر حَتَّى تَشْرُق الشمسُ أَي تَطْلُعَ، وَقَالَ أَبو عُبَيْدٍ: فِيهِ قَوْلَانِ: يُقَالُ سُمِّيَتْ بِذَلِكَ لأَنهم كَانُوا يُشَرِّقون فِيهَا لُحوم الأَضاحي، وَقِيلَ: بَلْ سُمِّيَتْ بِذَلِكَ لأَنها كلَّها أَيام تَشْرِيقٍ لِصَلَاةِ يومِ النَّحْرِ … قَالَ: وَهَذَا أَعجب الْقَوْلَيْنِ إليَّ

Tashrīq of meat is cutting it, drying it, and spreading it out — and from this the Days of Tashrīq are named. The Days of Tashrīq are three days after the Day of Naḥr, because the meat of the sacrifices is dried in the sun during them. And it is said: they were named this because in the pre-Islamic period people used to say, “Shine forth, Thabīr, so that we may set off” … Ibn al-Aʿrābī said: they were named this because the hady and the sacrificial animals are not slaughtered until the sun rises (tashruq). Abū ʿUbayd said: there are two opinions on it — it is said they were named this because people used to dry the meat of the sacrifices in them, and it is said they were rather named this because all of them are days that follow (tashrīq) the prayer of the Day of Naḥr … he said: and this is the more appealing of the two opinions to me.

— Lisān al-ʿArab, printed page 10/176 of .

Four explanations, four attributions, on one page, and the compiler does not resolve them into one. A word about drying meat in the sun, a line the Arabs shouted at a mountain before Islam changed their practice, a claim about when the sacrificial animal may be slaughtered, and a claim about which prayer these days trail behind — Abū ʿUbayd himself hears two of these and states a preference rather than a certainty. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī records the same three-way split independently, on printed page 2/84 of , confirming that the disagreement, not any single answer, is what actually circulated among the commentators.

Whichever explanation is right, what is not in dispute is the count and the position: three days, immediately after the Day of Naḥr, named after something that happens in or around them rather than something a pilgrim in particular does on them. That is why the name applies to a person at home exactly as much as to a person in Minā — nobody’s meat, nobody’s mountain, nobody’s prayer schedule needs to be at the Kaʿbah for the word to describe the calendar correctly.

The classification these three days receive — ʿĪd, days of eating and drinking — is not a description in the abstract. It produces a specific, negative ruling: nobody fasts.

That much is close to settled. What is not settled is whether the rule is completely without exception, or whether it bends once, for one person, in one circumstance. The editors of the Abū Dāwūd edition cited above summarise the dispute directly beneath the “our ʿĪd” hadith, in a note built out of al-Nawawī’s commentary on Muslim:

A group holds that fasting these three days does not become valid under any circumstance whatsoever — the position al-Nawawī calls the more apparent of the two views in the Shāfiʿī school, and the position of Abū Ḥanīfah and Ibn al-Mundhir.
A second group holds it is permitted for anyone, voluntarily or otherwise — a view Ibn al-Mundhir attributes to al-Zubayr b. al-ʿAwwām, Ibn ʿUmar, and Ibn Sīrīn.
A third group — Mālik, al-Awzāʿī, Isḥāq, and al-Shāfiʿī in his other view — permits it for exactly one person: a pilgrim performing tamattuʿ who could not find an animal to sacrifice.

The third position is the one with a verse behind it. Describing the pilgrim performing ʿumrah followed by ḥajj, the Qurʾān lays out what is owed if no hady can be found:

فَإِذَآ أَمِنتُمْ فَمَن تَمَتَّعَ بِٱلْعُمْرَةِ إِلَى ٱلْحَجِّ فَمَا ٱسْتَيْسَرَ مِنَ ٱلْهَدْىِ ۚ فَمَن لَّمْ يَجِدْ فَصِيَامُ ثَلَـٰثَةِ أَيَّامٍ فِى ٱلْحَجِّ وَسَبْعَةٍ إِذَا رَجَعْتُمْ ۗ تِلْكَ عَشَرَةٌ كَامِلَةٌ …

… And when you are secure, then whoever benefits by combining ʿumrah with ḥajj shall offer whatever sacrifice is feasible for him. But if he cannot find one, then a fast of three days during ḥajj and seven when you have returned — those are ten complete …

— Sūrat al-Baqarah, 2:196

The pilgrim this verse addresses is the one narrow case where fasting one or more of these three days becomes not just permitted but, on this reading, the required substitute for an animal he does not have. Everyone else covered by the three-day prohibition — which is to say, nearly everyone reading this — has no such door open.

That three genuinely different legal conclusions come out of essentially the same body of transmitted material is not a defect in the sources; it is what the sources actually contain. Attribute each position to the school that holds it, and none of the three needs to be wrong for the other two to be right — this is a live disagreement, not a settled ruling with two outlying opinions.

A second obligation runs alongside the fasting rule rather than replacing it: for anyone who has not yet offered a qurbānī, these days are also the last opportunity.

How last depends on which school is asked. The Ḥanafīs, Mālikīs and Ḥanbalīs count the days on which sacrifice is valid as three in total — the Day of Naḥr and the first two days after it, closing at sunset on the 12th. The Shāfiʿīs count four, extending the window through the third day of Tashrīq itself:

أَيَّامُ النَّحْرِ ثَلاَثَةٌ: الْعَاشِرُ وَالْحَادِيَ عَشَرَ وَالثَّانِيَ عَشَرَ مِنْ ذِي الْحِجَّةِ، وَذَلِكَ هُوَ مَذْهَبُ الْحَنَفِيَّةِ وَالْمَالِكِيَّةِ وَالْحَنَابِلَةِ … وَذَهَبَ الشَّافِعِيَّةُ إِلَى أَنَّ أَيَّامَ النَّحْرِ أَرْبَعَةٌ: يَوْمُ النَّحْرِ وَأَيَّامُ التَّشْرِيقِ لِمَا رَوَى جُبَيْرُ بْنُ مُطْعِمٍ قَال: قَال رَسُول اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ: كُل أَيَّامِ التَّشْرِيقِ ذَبْحٌ

The days of Naḥr are three: the tenth, eleventh and twelfth of Dhū al-Ḥijjah — this is the school of the Ḥanafīs, the Mālikīs and the Ḥanbalīs … The Shāfiʿīs held that the days of Naḥr are four: the Day of Naḥr and the Days of Tashrīq, on the basis of what Jubayr b. Muṭʿim related, that the Messenger of Allah said: “every day of Tashrīq is a day of sacrifice.”

— al-Mawsūʿah al-Fiqhiyyah al-Kuwaytiyyah, printed page 7/320 of .

The hadith the Shāfiʿī position rests on is preserved in Aḥmad’s Musnad:

حَدَّثَنَا أَبُو الْيَمَانِ، قَالَ: حَدَّثَنَا سَعِيدُ بْنُ عَبْدِ الْعَزِيزِ، عَنْ سُلَيْمَانَ بْنِ مُوسَى، عَنْ جُبَيْرِ بْنِ مُطْعِمٍ، عَنِ النَّبِيِّ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ، فَذَكَرَ مِثْلَهُ، وَقَالَ: كُلُّ أَيَّامِ التَّشْرِيقِ ذَبْحٌ

Abū al-Yamān narrated to us: Saʿīd b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz narrated to us, from Sulaymān b. Mūsā, from Jubayr b. Muṭʿim, from the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), who mentioned something similar and said: “every day of Tashrīq is a day of sacrifice.”

— Musnad Aḥmad, printed page 27/317 of , hadith 16752. The edition’s editors note this chain shares a weakness with the report before it — a break and some confusion among its narrators — while recording that the same conclusion is reached by a separate, sound chain through Ibn ʿAbbās and a further report through ʿAlī graded ḥasan.

So the claim that these days remain open for sacrifice does not rest on one uncontested report; it rests on a chain the editors themselves flag as imperfect, shored up by two others that are not the same report at all. That is precisely the kind of evidence a careful reader should be shown rather than a tidy citation with the difficulty quietly dropped. Whichever school a reader follows, the practical instruction is the same shape: check before the final sunset of these days, because for every school there is one, and it is not the same sunset for all of them.

Two obligations, then, run through all three days regardless of where a person is standing: no fasting, for everyone but the one pilgrim named above, and — for anyone who has not yet done so — a closing window to offer the sacrifice. The Qurʾān also names a third thing these days are for, remembrance of Allah specifically, a command with its own wording and its own history that deserves its own treatment rather than a single borrowed paragraph here.

A season that opened with the tenth day’s slaughter and shaving does not, on this reading, simply stop being asked of anyone once the animal is offered. It closes with three days that ask for almost nothing external — no rite, no place, no specific posture — and forbid one thing outright while quietly keeping one door open a little longer for whoever still needs it.

If anything above is wrong — a rendering that misses the Arabic, a page that does not say what we say it says, a school’s position stated with more confidence than the sources allow — tell us. We would rather be corrected than left standing.

May Allah ﷻ accept the sacrifice of everyone who offered one this year, and count the days that follow it among the good deeds of everyone who kept nothing but an ordinary week.