Denying the Prayer, and Neglecting It

Third: if a person denies that ṣalāh is farḍ, rejects that ṣalāh is farḍ, then according to the Sharīʿah that person is deemed and regarded as a non-Muslim. If he does everything else in Islam — he or she prays, fasts during the month of Ramaḍān, gives extra zakāh, goes to ḥajj (a bad example, since it is hard to see how) — but says: I do not want to pray, and I believe that ṣalāh is not farḍ; ṣalāh is nonsense; I do not believe — naʿūdhu billāh — that ṣalāh is compulsory; it is merely optional, it is not farḍ — then this person automatically becomes a kāfir according to the Sharīʿah. However, if a person does not pray out of ghaflah, heedlessness — out of negligence, out of laziness, out of sickness of the heart, out of weakness of īmān — and when he is asked to pray he says: I know I should pray, but may Allah forgive me; one day, in shāʾ Allāh, I will make tawbah, and I will pray; I believe one hundred per cent, for certain, that ṣalāh must be performed — this person is regarded as a fāsiq, not a kāfir. He is still a Muslim, because he has īmān; but he has come so close to the borderline of kufr — so close to the borderline of kufr — because he has no ṣalāh, she has no ṣalāh, in his or her life. This is absolute danger.

To indicate this there is a hadith of the Prophet (peace be upon him) which many of the mufassirūn and many of the muḥaddithūn have interpreted — have given taʾwīl of, and explained from the point of view of Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jamāʿah — in which the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says: he who abandons ṣalāh — "without a sharʿī excuse", in brackets — shall become a kāfir. Shall become a kāfir. Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, and some of the Ḥanābilah, insist upon this strongly. Imam al-Ghazālī, Imam al-Suyūṭī and others of Ahl al-Sunnah wal-Jamāʿah, in explaining this hadith — that if a person does not pray he becomes a kāfir — say: al-ṣalātu ʿimād al-dīn; ṣalāh is the backbone of the religion, the main pillar of the building. If the main pillar of a building goes, what happens to the building? It collapses; the person's house collapses on him. He comes so close to kufr, and if he continues in that way, it is feared that in the end he will lose his īmān. But still, technically, he is regarded as a Muslim. In al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaghīr it is also said that this person, through this negligence, becomes deserving of the ʿāqibah — the punishment, the ending — of a kāfir, like a kāfir on the Day of Judgement: he becomes deserving of the punishment a kāfir deserves for not believing in ṣalāh or in Islam. He shall receive such a severe punishment on the Day of Judgement for neglecting ṣalāh — neglecting ṣalāh — that it is almost as if he receives the same punishment in Jahannam as the other disbelievers. Not eternally.