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Sujud al-tilawa (prostration of recitation)

سجدة التلاوة

Sujud al-tilawa is a prostration made when reciting one of the Qur'an's prostration verses; the Kuwaiti Fiqh Encyclopedia devotes a section to its rulings and its repetition in a single sitting 1.

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Worship and the pillarsScripture and its sciences

Overview

Sujud is humility, lowering oneself, placing the forehead on the ground; the law reserved it for the known integral of prayer and what resembles it — the prostration of the Quran and the prostration of gratitude. 2

The Quranic prostration

Al-Raghib divided prostration into voluntary — which belongs to man and earns reward — and the prostration of subjugation, which belongs to man, animals and inanimate things as a silent testimony that they are created. 2

Its form

The most complete prostration is on seven limbs: the forehead with the nose, the two hands, the two knees and the two feet — "I was commanded to prostrate on seven limbs." 3

People and things also explored

Command, prohibition and capacity· The ruling on one who abandons prayer· Ada' (performance of an obligation within its time)· Adhan (the call to prayer: its ruling, wording, conditions, recommended features and the muezzin)· Bone (adhm): purity, use and retaliation· The adornment of desires and the goods of this world· The people of the bench (ahl al-suffa)· The seven ahruf

Sources

  1. al-Mawsu'a al-Fiqhiyya al-Kuwaitiyya, Noor-Book copy (file named v3)
  2. al-Mawsu'a al-Fiqhiyya al-Kuwaitiyya, Noor-Book copy (file named v3) , p.9405
  3. al-Mawsu'a al-Fiqhiyya al-Kuwaitiyya, Noor-Book copy (file named v3) , p.9406
Cite this page

islam.museum contributors. “Sujud al-tilawa (prostration of recitation)”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/practice/sujud-tilawa/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-10-23.

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Command, prohibition and capacity

The duty of complying with prohibitions by avoidance, and with commands according to one's capacity; in Abu Hurayra's hadith 'what I forbid you, avoid, and what I command you, do of it what you can' — its occasion, per Ibn Rajab, being the questioner who asked when hajj was imposed 'every year?' until he said it three times and was told 'had I said yes it would have been obligatory and you could not have managed'; Ibn Rajab derives from it the prohibition of asking about what is not needed, of asking out of obstinacy, frivolity or mockery, of asking about what God has hidden from His servants, and of questions on the lawful and unlawful that might draw stricter rulings, noting that licence to ask was for bedouins and delegations, not the residents of Medina; and in Abu Sa'id al-Khudri's hadith — the thirty-fourth — the three grades of changing evil by hand, then tongue, then heart, according to capacity, that being the weakest of faith, corroborated by Ibn Masud's report that whoever struggles against the successors who say what they do not do with hand, tongue or heart is a believer, and beyond the heart there is not a mustard-seed of faith (pp. 218–222, 698–699).