prayer, zakat, fasting, Hajj, charity (1), trustworthiness, dutifulness to parents, maintaining ties of kinship, kind treatment of one’s family and neighbors, and the like.

The ruler is therefore obliged to command everyone under his authority to perform all the prescribed prayers and, by the consensus of Muslims, to punish whoever abandons them.

If those who abandon prayer are a recalcitrant group [A/Q 30], they are to be fought for abandoning it (2), by the consensus of Muslims. Likewise, they are to be fought for failing to pay zakat, fast, or fulfill other obligations, and for declaring lawful any manifest prohibition upon which there is consensus, such as marriage to prohibited female relatives, spreading corruption in the land, and the like. Every recalcitrant group that refuses to abide by any manifest and indisputably established precept of Islam must therefore be fought until religion is wholly for Allah, by the agreement of the scholars (3).

If the person who abandons prayer is an individual, one view holds that he should be punished by beating and imprisonment until he prays. The majority (4) of scholars, however, hold that he must be put to death if he refuses to pray after being called to repent, just as an apostate is called to repent (5). If he repents and prays, the matter ends there; otherwise, he is put to death. Whether he is put to death as an unbeliever or as a sinful Muslim (6) is subject to two views. Most of the early generations held that he is put to death as an unbeliever. All of this applies when he acknowledges that prayer is obligatory. If, however, he denies its obligation, he is an unbeliever by the consensus of