Академия Корана:Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān/Afternoon

Alford T. Welch, "Afternoon" in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, General Editor: J. D. McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

The time between noon and evening. The Qurʾān refers frequently to various times of the day, but does not explicitly mention the afternoon. In most cases this segment of the day appears simply in the context of instructions for Muḥammad’s followers involving the Islamic rituals that were being established during his lifetime.

Several passages that address Muḥammad’s situation in Mecca before his emigration to Medina command him to perform a ritual prayer (see prayer) twice daily: «at the two ends of the day» (q 11:114), «at evening and at dawn» (q 40:55), etc. (Welch, Muḥammad’s understanding, 21-2). A third daily prayer, most likely instituted in Medina (Watt and Welch, Der Koran, 264-71), is mentioned in q 2:238: «Remember the prayers, and [also] the middle prayer (al- ṣalāt al-wusṭā), and stand reverently before God.» This ritual was probably performed in the «middle» of the day, specifically in the early afternoon, thus being a precursor to «the noon prayer» (ṣalāt al-ẓuhr,, Paret, Kommentar, 50-1). When, sometime after Muḥammad’s death, the performance of the prayer ritual came to be required five times daily, Qurʾān commentators interpreted q 2:238 as referring to the «middle» of the five, the ṣalāt al-ʿaṣr. Many ḥadīth in al-Bukhārī(Ṣaḥīḥ, K. Mawāqīt al-ṣalāt), Muslim (Ṣaḥīḥ, K. al-Ṣalāt) and the other major collections show that the times when the daily prayers were performed as well as their names were not set during Muḥammad’s lifetime.

The term ʿaṣr occurs in the Qurʾān only once, in the oath wa-l-ʿaṣr in q 103:1 (see oaths). This oath form wa-… («[I swear] by…») occurs at the beginning of eighteen sūras, half involving times of the day or celestial bodies: «the dawn» (al-fajr, q 89:1), «the forenoon» (al-ḍuḥā, q 93:1), «the night» (al-layl, q 92:1), «the star» (al-najm, q 53:1), «the sun» (al-shams, q 91:1), etc. The basic meaning of ʿaṣr is «epoch» or «era» in the sense of passing time. The Shāfiʿite commentator al-Bayḍāwī (d. ca. 700/1300) in his commentary (Tafsīr, ii, 670) and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Maḥallī (d. 864/1459) and al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) in theirs (Jalālayn, 810) summarize well the views of most classical commentators, saying ʿaṣr in q 103:1 could refer to time (al-dahr, see time), the late afternoon, the ṣalāt al-ʿaṣr, the era of the prophets or the era of Muḥammad. Variant readings of this sūra (see readings of the qurʾān) provided by the Companions Ibn Masʿūd (d. 32/652) and ʿAlī (d. 40/660, see ʿalī b. abī ṭālib) add verses ending with al-dahr (Jeffery, Materials, 111, 192), supporting the preference of many modern Muslim scholars for interpreting ʿaṣr in q 103:1 simply as «time» (see Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Awḍaḥ, 761; Nadwī, Qāmūs, 418). The translation «afternoon» preferred by R. Bell, A.J. Arberry, R. Paret and other Europeans appears to derive from the association of this verse with ṣalāt al-ʿaṣr. M. Pickthall possibly best translates ʿaṣr in q 103:1 as «the declining day» (Bell, 676; Paret, Kommentar, 521).

Unlike the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday, the Islamic weekly congregational service on Friday afternoon was set to occur during a busy day of commerce, as is seen in the Qurʾān’s only explicit reference to it: «Believers, when the call is given for worship on the Day of Assembly, hasten to God’s service and stop bar-gaining…. Then when the worship is finished, disperse and seek God’s bounty» (q 62:9-10). The Islamic weekly service appears to have been established to coincide with the Friday market day held by the Jewish clans in Medina before the beginning of their Sabbath at sundown (Goitein, Origin, 185; Watt and Welch, Der Islam, 296-7).

See also day, times of.

Bibliography

Primary

• Bayḍāwī, Anwār, 2 vols., Istanbul 1296
• Jalālayn, Beirut n.d.
• Qurṭubī, Tafsīr, 20, 178-9
• Rāzī, Tafsīr, 32, 84-6

Secondary

• S.D. Goitein, Origin and nature of the Muslim Friday worship, in mw 49 (1959), 183-95
• M. Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Awḍah al-tafsīr, Cairo n.d. (represents the views of several al-Azhar scholars)
• Jeffery, Materials
• ʿA.A.ʿA. Nadwī, Qāmūs alfāẓ al-Qurʾān al-karīm, Jiddah 1983
• R. Paret, Grenzen der Koranforschung, Stuttgart 1950, 31-5
• id., Kommentar
• W.M. Watt and A.T. Welch, Der Islam, i. Mohammed und die Frühzeit — Islamisches Recht — Religiöses Leben, Stuttgart 1980, 262—347
• A.T. Welch, Muḥammad’s understanding of himself
• The Koranic data, in R. Hovannisian and S. Vryonis (eds.), Islam’s understanding of itself, Malibu 1983