Prophet's Traditions on Prohibiting Sleeping on the Abdomen: A Jurisprudential (Fiqh) Hadith Study

Abstract

This paper deals with the Prophet's traditions (Ahadith) on forbidding sleeping on the abdomen. It aims at investigating these traditions and narrations in a hadith, juristic and medical study. The analytical inductive approach was used in this paper, which has reached the following significant findings:

There are many ways of sleeping, the best of which is sleeping on the right side of the body. The prohibition of sleeping on the abdomen was narrated in six weak hadiths due to some weak narrations or illusion and confusion in some of these texts; this prohibition is in only one authentic saying by Ibn Syreen, which is not considered reliable enough to form a legal ruling. Tekhfa Alghafary's hadiths on prohibiting sleeping on the right side is one of the most confusing hadiths in the names of both the Prophet's companion and the narrator. Sleeping on the abdomen is permissible since permission is the basis in the rulings of ways of sleeping and   hadiths in this regard are weak; Islam urges its followers to take general tact and norms into consideration as long as they do not violate rules of Islamic law (Shari'ah); physicians have different opinions regarding sleeping on the abdomen: some of them regard it as normal sleeping while others think it has negative effects on human's health. Our recommendation is that further investigation is carried out into the hadiths of sleeping on the back and academically editing Al-Haby’s book “Honoring the Guest”.