the prayer, and that he must hasten to perform it as soon as he awakens or remembers it.
Anas’s additional wording, may Allah be pleased with him, indicates that this is the expiation, and that if he does not do so, no deed can expiate it—except, perhaps, sincere repentance.
All of this proves that if someone deliberately allows a prayer to pass beyond its prescribed time, praying it after its time cannot expiate for it, because he has no excuse. Allah, Most High, says: “Indeed, prayer has been prescribed for the believers at fixed times.” Such a person is not like one who slept through it or forgot it, for the latter is excused by the explicit wording of the hadith. That is why he has been given the expiation of praying it when he remembers it.
Do you not see that even this excused person, if he does not hasten to pray when he remembers, has no expiation thereafter, because he has squandered the time that Allah prescribed for him to make up the missed prayer? If this is the case with one who is excused—namely, that he cannot make it up after the time prescribed for him has passed—then it is all the more fitting that one who deliberately failed to pray within its time, despite remembering it and being legally accountable for it, should have no expiation. This is plain jurisprudential understanding for anyone who reflects upon it free from the influence of blind adherence and the opinion of the majority.
From what has preceded, the error of some later scholars who drew an analogy between the deliberate neglecter and the one who forgets becomes clear. They said: “If making up the prayer is obligatory for one who sleeps through it or forgets it, despite their not having been negligent, then its obligation is all the more compelling for the deliberately negligent person!”
Yet this analogy is invalid at its very foundation, for it is an analogy between opposites: the deliberate person who remembers is the opposite of the one who forgets or sleeps.
Moreover, the view that making up the prayer is obligatory for one who deliberately neglects it conflicts with the wisdom behind assigning fixed times to prayer, which is a condition for the prayer’s validity. If the condition is violated, the conditioned act is necessarily invalid,