Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb—may Allah have mercy on him—notes in his marginal commentary on al-Muqniʿ (1/95–96) by Ibn Qudāmah, concurring with the author.

Although Imām al-Shawkānī explicitly declares in al-Sayl al-Jarrār (1/292) that whoever deliberately abandons the prayer is an unbeliever, deserving death, and that the Muslim ruler is obliged to execute him, he clarifies in Nayl al-Awtār that he does not mean a type of disbelief for which forgiveness is impossible. After relating the scholars’ various opinions and some of their proofs (1/154–155), he states:

“The truth is that he is an unbeliever who is to be killed. As for his disbelief, the authentic hadiths confirm that the Lawgiver called the one who leaves the prayer by that name, and He placed between a man and the permissibility of applying that name to him only the performance of the prayer; abandoning it permits the designation. None of the objections raised by the earlier scholars bind us, for we say: it is entirely possible for certain kinds of disbelief not to bar forgiveness or eligibility for intercession, just as some sins committed by the people of the qiblah have been called disbelief by the Lawgiver. Hence there is no need for the forced interpretations into which people have wandered.”

He has spoken the truth—may Allah have mercy on him—yet his readiness to apply the term “unbeliever” to the one who abandons the prayer strikes me as an unwarranted extension, for the hadiths he cites contain no such unrestricted wording; rather, they state:
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