he fears that he will miss the congregation, then it is better for him to discontinue it so that he may catch the congregational prayer.

Someone may ask: How can he discontinue it when he has begun an obligatory prayer, and discontinuing an obligatory prayer is prohibited?

We reply: It is prohibited if he discontinues it in order to abandon it. But if he discontinues it in order to move to something better, then it is not prohibited; rather, he may even be commanded to do so. Do you not see that the Prophet ﷺ instructed his Companions who had not brought sacrificial animals with them to make their Hajj into an umrah (1), so that they would perform tamattuʿ? He instructed them to discontinue the obligatory rite altogether in order to perform tamattuʿ, because tamattuʿ is better than performing Hajj alone. Thus, if someone intended to exit Hajj through umrah merely in order to free himself from Hajj, he would not be allowed to do so. This person has not discontinued the obligation out of aversion to it; rather, he has discontinued it in favor of what is more complete and more beneficial.

“And if he changes, by intention, from one obligatory prayer to another, both are invalid ...”

The author’s statement, “And if he changes, by intention, from one obligatory prayer to another, both are invalid,” is the second category of changing from one intention to another: namely, changing from one obligatory prayer to a different one.

An example is that a person begins praying Asr, then remembers that he had prayed Zuhr without ablution. He therefore intends that his current prayer be Zuhr. Neither his Asr prayer nor his Zuhr prayer is valid: the obligatory prayer he changed from has been invalidated, while the obligatory prayer he changed to was not intended from its beginning.