The Scholars’ Consensus on Making Up Missed Prayers

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

The following is taken from Making-Up Missed Prayers - A Point of Scholarly Consensus on whether making up missed prayers necessary, by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani. 

The position of all four Sunni schools is that it is fardh, obligatory, to make up all missed prayers, regardless of why they were missed.  Prayer is the first thing we will be questioned about on the Day of Judgement, as the Prophet (s.a.w.) informed us in sound narrations. 

Imam Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn Sharaf an-Nawawi (r.a.) stated, in Majmu’ Sharh al-Muhadzdzab, “There is consensus of the scholars whose opinion counts that whoever leaves a prayer intentionally must make it up.  ibn Hazm differed with them on this, saying that such an individual cannot ever make them up and it is not at all valid to make them up.  Rather, he said, one must do much good works and voluntary prayer in order that one s scales be heavy on the Day of Judgement and one must seek Allah’s Forgiveness and repent.  This position of his, along with being in opposition to scholarly consensus, is invalid in terms of the proof.  Among the proofs for the obligation to makeup is: that if make-up prayers are obligatory for the one who left the prayer forgetfully, then doing so for the one who left the prayer deliberately is more obviously incumbent.” 

Imam an-Nawawi (r.a.) is referring here to the hadits related by Sayyidina Anas ibn Malik (r.a.) that the Messenger of Allah (s.a.w.) said: “Whoever forgets a prayer must perform it when they remember it.”  This is recorded in Swahih al-Bukhari and Swahih Muslim.  After Imam an-Nawawi’s (r.a.) time, the aberrant position of Imam Abu Muhammad ‘Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Hazm (r.a.) was embraced by certain individuals and soundly rejected by the scholars in their time and after.