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What is meant by the the Hadith: "Every innovation is misguidance, and every misguidance is in the Fire," and what are some everyday examples of it?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

Acts of worship are tawqifiyyah (i.e., divinely ordained and not subject to human reasoning), so Allah is not to be worshipped except in the manner He has prescribed. Any matter for which there is no textual religious proof is an innovation (bid‘ah), based on the Prophet’s (peace be upon him) saying: "Whoever introduces into this matter of ours something that does not belong to it, it will be rejected." Innovation is an invented method in religion that imitates what is legislated, intended to exaggerate in the worship of Allah. It contradicts the Sharī‘ah in setting limits, adhering to specific modalities, and committing to specific acts of worship at specific times for which there is no scriptural evidence. An example of this is people gathering to recite Surat Ya-Sin after Fajr and persisting in it. Among the criteria for innovation is: any action that the Prophet (peace be upon him) did not perform despite the presence of the motivating factor and the absence of any impediment. This excludes the Tarawih prayer and the compilation of the Qur’an.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

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