A Communal Duty with a Documented Exception

That the funeral prayer is a communal rather than individual obligation, discharged for the whole community once enough people perform it, is a specific category of duty in Islamic law, fard kifaya, applied elsewhere to obligations such as returning a greeting or answering an emergency, where the point is that the community as a whole is answerable rather than every single member, and its application here means a Muslim who has no opportunity to attend a given funeral prayer bears no guilt for missing it as long as others discharged it.

Hadith literature preserves a specific and often discussed limit on this obligation: reports describe Muhammad declining on at least one occasion to personally lead the prayer over someone who had died still owing an unpaid debt, instructing companions to settle the debt first, a report jurists have read less as excluding such a person from the prayer altogether than as underlining how seriously unpaid financial obligations were regarded even in death. The prayer's unusual form, performed standing with a sequence of spoken formulas and specific invocations rather than the bowing and prostration of the five daily prayers, is generally explained by jurists as fitting to its purpose, a plea on behalf of another person rather than an act of personal worship, which is also why, unlike the five daily prayers, it carries no fixed times of day it must avoid and can be performed whenever the body and community are ready.