—because a woman is ʿawrah—and she is not permitted to travel without a mahram, nor to live with a family that includes men who are not her maharim. Such circumstances expose her to temptation and expose others to being tempted by her. Allah knows best.
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Repentance of one who has abandoned the prayer
Question: I have spent most of my life without praying. What must I do now? Is it required of me to make up the missed prayers, to offer an expiation, or simply to repent? How is each of these performed, and in what manner?
Answer: What is obligatory upon you is to repent to Allah, exalted is He, and to guard the prayer for the remainder of your life. You must resolve to repent while fulfilling its conditions: feeling remorse for what has passed, completely abandoning the sin—that is, leaving it once and for all—and firmly determining never to return to it.
If you realise such repentance, obey Allah the Almighty henceforth, and keep up your prayers, that will suffice for you, God willing, and you do not have to make up the prayers you previously missed, for you left them deliberately. Deliberately abandoning the prayer is disbelief in Allah; indeed, according to the sounder of the two scholarly opinions, intentionally giving up the prayer expels a person from the religion even if he does not deny its obligation.
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Repentance erases what came before it
Question: I abandoned the prayer for several years and do not know how many prayers I missed. Praise be to Allah, I have now repented of that neglect and have begun to perform the prayer again. Must I make up what I missed during those years or not?
Answer: It is sufficient for you to repent to Allah, exalted is He, for what has passed and to maintain