The Ruling on Making Up Missed Prayers After Repentance

Question:
May Allah reward you. We received this question from one of the brothers, who says: I abandoned the prayer for a period of ten years, and I have repented to my Lord and started maintaining the prayers at their times, regularly, along with the rawatib (the regular voluntary prayers attached to the obligatory ones). I am confused about whether I must make up the prayers I abandoned. What is your advice to us, may Allah reward you?

Answer:
If, when you abandoned it, you did not affirm its obligation and did not consider it obligatory or a fard (obligatory), then this is apostasy from Islam by the consensus of the Muslims. So if you repented to Allah and entered Islam anew, then maintain the prayer in your remaining life. However, if you acknowledged its obligation but abandoned it out of laziness, this is a matter of disagreement among the scholars: is it obligatory for you to make them up or not?
The correct and stronger position is that it is not obligatory for you to make them up, but it is obligatory for you to maintain the prayer in the future of your life. What passed during your abandonment of the prayer, even if it was deliberate laziness, means you were not upon Islam during that period. So if you repented to Allah, you entered Islam anew, so maintain your prayer. Yes.