Did for Long Many Acts of Worship Wrongly or Made Mistakes in them Unknowingly

12-3-2023 | IslamWeb

Question:

Assalamualaikum. What is the ruling on someone who had been doing ibadaat the wrong way or making mistakes because he didn't know and later realized and overcame his mistakes? Were all his previous ibadaats invalid?

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Answer:

All perfect praise be to Allah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, and that Muhammad is His slave and Messenger.

First of all, we draw your attention that the acceptance or non-acceptance of an act of worship is a matter of the Unseen that only Allah the Almighty knows. A servant may perform an act of worship complete with its pillars, conditions, obligations, and recommended actions, but Allah the Almighty does not accept it; for example, if it was for the sake of showing off.

What the jurists and Muftis talk about is the ruling on the validity or invalidity of an act of worship due to the deficiency of one of its conditions or one of its pillars. Thus, we cannot issue a Fatwa regarding your question, because you did not explain to us what the error or the incorrect way of performing is, so that we know whether it is something that invalidates worship or not. Because the mistake in the act of worship may be a mistake in leaving something desirable or doing something disliked, and this type of error does not affect the validity of worship. It can also be a mistake in leaving a pillar or doing a forbidden act; in which case, it affects the validity of worship.

Therefore, in order to get the answer, please tell us first what is the act of worship in which the error occurred, and secondly, what is the error or the incorrect way of performing the act of worship.

We cannot further elaborate on the answer by mentioning other possibilities since the question is not clear to us.

Allah knows best.