Answered by Shaykh Sohail Hanif, SunniPath Academy Teacher
I was somewhere after sunset, and I wasn’t able to find the direction for Qiblah, but I prayed Maghrib anyway. I still don’t know if that was the right direction, should I repeat prayer?
Assalamu alaykum
Facing the direction of prayer (qibla) is a condition for the validity of the prayer. However, it is clearly more difficult to ensure whether one is actually facing the ka’ba in Makka than ensuring that one has performed the ritual ablution, another condition for the validity of the prayer. Two questions therefore arise: What is the direction of prayer? And what does it mean to face the direction of prayer?
To answer the first question, the direction of prayer is any direction that is within 45° of the actual ka’ba. So as long as the direction one is facing is less than 45° away from the ka’ba then one has faced the direction of the prayer.
As for what it means to face the direction it means one of two things. It either means a) that one is actually facing the direction of the prayer whether one intended to do so or not, as is the case of someone who prays without checking which direction he is facing but after finishing the prayer finds out that he was facing the correct direction, or b) that one has made an attempt to face the direction of prayer whether one is in reality facing the correct direction or not, as is the case of someone who has to pray but is unaware of the correct direction so he looks at the sun, or considers the route which he took to get to where he is from a place where he knows the direction of prayer and with this information makes an educated guess as to where he believes the direction of prayer to be. In this case he may pray and his prayer is correct even if he later finds out that he was facing the wrong direction because he exerted effort to discover the right direction.
So based on this the answer to the question above is that one’s prayer is valid if either a) one exerted some effort to discover the direction of prayer before praying even if just a guess based on some simple facts, or b) that one can verify that the direction that one prayed was the actual direction. If neither a) nor b) occurred then one must repeat the prayer.
And Allah knows best.
Sohail Hanif