—there is no prayer for him. The scholars, may Allah have mercy on them, differed: does the non-acceptance cover every prayer—obligatory and voluntary alike—or is it limited to the voluntary prayers only? Some maintained that the obligatory prayer is still accepted, because its time has been expressly exempted by the Sacred Law and because the slave will perform it whether he is with his master or on the run. Others argued that the hadith is unrestricted in scope, and that the slave may indeed be punished in this way; they explained that the negation of acceptance, in the case of voluntary prayers, refers to lack of validity, whereas in the case of obligatory prayers it denotes the loss of reward. This is a sound harmonization of the texts.