A Surah with a Disputed Second Bow

Fourteen or fifteen verses across the Quran are traditionally read as calling for a physical prostration by the reciter or listener, and Al-Hajj is the one surah where the exact count is itself a point of disagreement among the legal schools: most jurists recognise a prostration verse at 22:18, but the Shafi'i school additionally treats 22:77 as a second prostration verse within the same surah, a position the Hanafi school does not share, making Al-Hajj the surah most directly implicated in the broader disagreement over how many prostration verses the Quran contains.

Abraham's commission to 'proclaim the pilgrimage to mankind' (22:27) underlies the traditional understanding that the Hajj, though reshaped and purified in Islamic practice, continues rites the Quran presents as originally Abrahamic rather than newly instituted, a framing later Islamic scholarship used to explain why specific pilgrimage rites, the running between Safa and Marwa among them, are retained as prescribed worship rather than treated as pre-Islamic custom the new religion simply inherited. The disagreement is treated by jurists as a minor, acknowledged difference between schools rather than a dispute requiring resolution, since a worshipper following either position is considered to have prayed correctly according to their own school's ruling.