What Should A Person Do If His or Her Ablution Is Nullified While Performing Prayer In Congregation?

What should a person do if his/her ablution is nullified while performing prayer in congregation?

If the ablution of a person who performs prayer in congregation is nullified, s/he performs ablution and re-establishes the prayer, which is the better act to do in such a case. Or s/he leaves prayer without doing any act that invalidates prayer, then performs ablution again, comes back and continues prayer with imam starting from the part where s/he left. If imam has already completed the prayer by the time s/he arrives, s/he waits in the remaining rakats without reciting, like a person who follows an imam, aproximataly as long as the imam would wait, and completes the prayer by reciting only the words in ruku and sajdah as well as the dua and salawats in the sitting (Marghinani, al-Hidayah, I, 381,382, Ibn Abidin, Radd al-Muhtar, 368 ff.).

A person whose ablution is nullified while performing prayer in the front rows of the congregation in a crowded mosque may continue prayer by imitating another jurisprudential school if his ablution is not deemed to have been invalidated according to any other school. For example, a member of Hanafi school part of whose body bleeds during prayer may complete his prayer by imitating Shafi’i school or other schools which say that bleeding does not invalidate ablution . However, if something like urinating or passing gas, which invalidates prayer according to all Islamic scholars, happens and he cannot go to the ablution place due to crowd, he sits and waits for the prayer to end or acts like nothing happened in order not to distract other people in the congregation. Afterwards, he performs ablution and establishes the prayer again.

Source: Presidency Of Religious Affairs The Turkey, High Board of Religious Affairs FATWA