He applied this ruling by analogy to the case of a sick person who remembers a prayer he missed while in good health, or a healthy person who recalls a prayer he omitted during illness—meaning that what is binding on him now is the form of the prayer required in his present circumstances.
Whoever likens make-up prayers to financial debts therefore preserves for the prayer being made up the very description it bore when it was first missed. By contrast, the scholar who insists that the make-up must always be performed in the full resident form considers the original description in one situation and the current circumstance in another: if he remembers a resident prayer while travelling, he follows the original description of the missed prayer, but if he remembers a travel prayer while at home, he follows his present state. Such inconsistency departs from sound analogy, unless adopted merely as a precaution—something conceivable for one who views shortening the prayer (qaṣr) as a concession.
Conditions and Time of the Make-Up
Among the contested conditions is the requirement of keeping prayers in sequence (tartīb). The jurists disagreed over whether observing this sequence is obligatory when making up missed prayers—that is, whether one must maintain the order between the current obligatory prayer and the missed ones, and also the order among several missed prayers themselves if they exceed a single prayer.
• Mālik held that maintaining order is compulsory when the missed prayers number five or fewer. One must begin with the missed prayer even if that causes the time of the present prayer to expire. Indeed, he said that if a person remembers the missed prayer while already engaged in the present one, the present prayer is thereby invalidated.
• Abū Ḥanīfah and al-Thawrī expressed a similar view, but they restrict the obligation of order to cases in which ample time remains for the current prayer.
All three agree that the duty of order lapses when the worshiper forgets.
• Al-Shāfiʿī, however, maintained that order is not obligatory; yet if one observes it while sufficient time remains for the current prayer, that is praiseworthy.
Why they differed
Their divergence stems from two causes: conflicting textual reports on the matter and disagreement over whether make-ups should be analogized to the original performance.
As for the reports, two seemingly contradictory ḥadiths have been transmitted:
- The Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—said, “Whoever forgets a prayer while he is with the imam in another, let him pray with the imam; when he has finished that prayer, let him repeat the prayer he forgot, then repeat the prayer he performed with the imam.”
The Shāfiʿīs consider this ḥadith weak. - They authenticate instead the report from Ibn ʿAbbās that the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—said, “If any of you forgets a prayer and remembers it while he is in an obligatory prayer, let him complete the prayer he is in; when he has finished, he is to make up the prayer he forgot.”
The sound ḥadith in this chapter, however, is the one already quoted: “When any of you sleeps through a prayer or forgets it…,” and so forth.
Regarding analogy, those who held that the obligation of order in performed prayers arises solely because their specific times are themselves ordered—since time can only be conceived sequentially—did not extend that ruling to make-ups, for the latter have no fixed times. Conversely, those who believed that the order pertains to the very act of prayer, even when the times coincide, as in the case of combining