IslamQA: Why do different Muslims (such as Hanafis) follow different prayer timings?

I have a confusion brother ! Please clear my mind of it. Im born in a hanafi family. Living in dubai, i see different kind of muslims praying differently, which gets me so confused that i think iam on the wrong way . Just wanna ask u why these hanafi shaifee hanbali and all others firqa's were not in the time of Prophet (pbuh) and the sahabas?? Why do we even have these

A hundred years after the Prophet’s death , the number of narrations claiming to be from him multiplied, going from a few thousand to close to a hundred thousand. At this time, Imam Malik started the process of verifying the authenticity of narrations claiming to be from the Prophet and created his collection al-Muwatta’. The Persian scholars Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawood, Tirmidhi, Nasa’i and Ibn Majah continued this work.

What we are left with are tens of thousands of narrations. Unlike the Quran, these narrations always contain an element of doubt, they are not guaranteed to be true, especially since we have “authentic” narrations the clearly contradict one another.

The times of the prayers is one of those matters where authentic narrations exist supporting different opinions, that is, different timings for the asr and isha’ prayers. Which timings one goes with depends on which narrations they prefer over the rest.

We believe that God could have made all matters, like prayer times, perfectly clear to us, but He didn’t out of His wisdom, as tests and lessons. The most important matters in Islam are all clarified in the Quran and well-established narrations. What remains are technical details that do not deserve fussing over. Staying united as a community is a Quranic principle, while the differences in prayer timings are matters of technical detail within hadith narrations, so the Quranic principle takes precedence. It is best to pray with the rest of the community instead of separating oneself, as long as the community is not doing something entirely unsupported by evidence.

When living in a cosmopolitan place like Dubai with many different Islamic groups living there, at home you could continue praying according to the Hanafi school. The Hanafi timings are compatible with mainstream timings, so anyone can pray at the Hanafi times without issue.

The difference is that Hanafis reject the mainstream timings, saying they are too early for asr and isha’, so that they refuse to pray at a mosque that performs these two prayers too early in their opinion. This means that you would only have an issue if you wanted to pray asr or isha’ at the mosque and the mosque holds these prayers too early.

Large mosques sometimes hold the same prayer multiple times as different groups of people arrive, so if the first time it is too early, you could pray with a second group. And sometimes while the athan is early, the iqama time is late, so that the prayer is actually held at a time that fits Hanafi opinions.