those who keep up the prayer consistently; they fall under the threat of punishment. About them is the hadith found in the Sunan collections, related by ʿUbadah ibn al-Ṣamit, in which the Prophet ﷺ said:

“Five prayers Allah has prescribed for His servants night and day. Whoever guards them has a covenant with Allah that He will admit him to Paradise; whoever does not guard them has no covenant with Allah—if He wills, He will punish him, and if He wills, He will forgive him.”

To “guard” them means to perform each prayer at its appointed time, as Allah, Exalted is He, has commanded. Whoever sometimes delays a prayer past its time or neglects some of its duties is therefore subject to Allah’s will: He may punish him or He may forgive him. Such a person may also have supererogatory prayers that make up for the deficiencies in his obligatory prayers, as the hadith states …

This is the sense indicated as well by the words of Imam Aḥmad, even though some of his later followers publicised from him the view that the one who abandons the prayer is an unbeliever—without… ⦗45⦘