either another act of worship, such as the noon prayer in place of the Friday prayer and a sacrificial offering in compensation for omitted obligatory rites of Hajj; or performance by someone else, such as Hajj on behalf of a permanently incapacitated person or the deceased.
This clarifies the distinction between prayer and fasting and other acts, as well as between one who has an excuse and one who does not. It also shows that whoever grants an unexcused person (1) the same latitude regarding prayer and fasting as is granted to one with an excuse has erred in his analogy.
The second answer:
We did not employ an analogy by which we derived the ruling of the subsidiary case from that of the original case. What we have stated is established by the revealed proofs, which, as explained above, leave no need for analogy. We mentioned the analogy only to enable a person to understand and conceptualize what the Sharia has prescribed in this matter, just as Allah sets forth parables to facilitate understanding and conceptualization—not because the analogy itself constitutes the legal proof.
The purpose of this analogy is to make clear that performing a prayer after its prescribed time, when Allah and His Messenger have forbidden delaying it, stands in the same position as performing these acts of worship. The intent is to compare one ruling with another, not one act with another, so that it may be understood (2) that the prayer is no longer accepted or valid, just as those acts are neither accepted nor valid. Some ignorant people suppose that the purpose of this is to downplay (3) the gravity of prayer and to say that whoever lets it lapse is relieved of making it up, thereby encouraging fools to let it lapse.
No Muslim says this. Rather, whoever says that a person who lets it lapse incurs no sin is a disbelieving apostate who must be called upon to repent; if he repents, he is spared, but otherwise he is put to death. Deliberately letting a prayer lapse is like deliberately failing to fast Ramadan, by the consensus of the Muslims. Thus, all Muslims from