Answered by Shaykh Sohail Hanif, SunniPath Academy Teacher
If a sister is expecting her period anytime… she is doing housework, or helping around the house and time for Salah enters, but she is still occupied in doing something as useless as watching TV or doing something important as housework/helping parents etc. so she keeps the niyah about making her salah before it is Qadah, but eventually when she goes to make her salah she finds that she has gotten her period. Henceforth she cannot make that salah anymore…is this a sin upon her?…because she could have done it but yet she was occupied… and she did make the niyah to make the salah before it became Qadah… if this is a sin depending on what she was doing please explain that as well
Assalamu alaykum
There is no sin upon this lady and she is not expected to make the prayer up. This is because in menstruation we look to the end of the prayer time. If she menstruated any time before the end of a particular prayer time, even if only moments before the beginning of the next prayer time, then she is not responsible for offering that particular prayer. It would be just as if she was menstruating for that entire prayer time. (Ibn Abidin, Radd al-Muhtar, 1:292, ‘Ilmiyya)
This is a great mercy from Allah Most High otherwise ladies in such situations would have to hasten to pray as soon as a prayer time enters which could clearly be awkward. Conversely this same principle applies when a lady’s menstruation draws to a close. If the bleeding stops before the end of a prayer time then one is responsible for offering that prayer as long as it leaves one with enough time to perform the ritual bath and to start the obligatory prayer. This means that one must be careful to check before the end of a prayer time for the cessation of bleeding if one is expecting the bleeding to end so that one may hasten to pray before the end of a prayer time.
And Allah knows best.
Sohail Hanif