Is Bismillah a Verse? Four Schools of Law, One Question

Two Mosques, One Street

There is a street like this in almost every mixed Muslim city on earth. On one side stands a mosque whose imam follows the Shafi'i school. At Maghrib he raises his voice: "Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem" — loud, deliberate, the very first words the congregation hears — and only then, "Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Aalameen." Directly across the road stands a Hanafi mosque. Its imam says "Allahu Akbar," pauses for a silent breath — he is reciting the bismillah, but under his breath — and the congregation hears the recitation begin at "Alhamdulillah." And in Fez, in Nouakchott, in any Maliki city of North and West Africa, a third imam begins the obligatory prayer with "Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Aalameen" and nothing before it at all. No bismillah. Not aloud. Not silently.

Three imams. Three practices. Every one of them backed by centuries of scholarship insisting that this — precisely this — is how the Prophet prayed.