Who says that one can continue a prayer after interrupting it for legal reasons?

Question

This question basically arose from Is it permissible to pause salah and do personal work and continue where you left?, which sounded to me a bit weird.
There are a few reasons which allow a person to interrupt his fard (obligatory) prayer (while the matter seems a bit more easier for nafl/sunnah prayers), some of them have been quoted in the answer of my former question: Can an Imam interrupt a prayer for some reason?.

I just read a fatwa of sheikh al-Albani (here's the link in Arabic) saying that there are two opinions on what one could do after the interruptions:

1. continue from where you stopped: for example you performed one raka'a and lost your tahara and made wudu' and came back to re join the congregation and count this full raka'a as achieved.
2. start from zero: assuming that the interrupted raka'a doesn't count as you've ended/interrupted your prayer and made it invalid. So in the example above you would join the congregation and consider your starting raka'a the one you could join it at after making wudu'.

I'd like to know which scholars or schools of thought hold the first opinion!
I'd appreciate if you could add an explanation on how this would be correctly done (conditions, which position to start or base on etc.)!

Answer 1

The hanafi school of fiqh holds this opinion and base it on the hadith in sunan ibn Majah saying that:

“The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: ‘Whoever vomits, has a nosebleed, belches, or emits prostatic fluid, should stop praying; perform ablution, then resume his prayer, and while he is in that state he should not speak.” (Sunan ibn Majah)

which is qualified as dai'f and they also refer to al-Muwatta':

• Yahya related to me from Malik from Nafi that Abdullah ibn Umar would leave and do wudu if he had a nose-bleed and then return and complete his prayer without saying anything. (al-Muwatta').

• Yahya related to me from Malik from Nafi that Abdullah ibn Abbas used to have nose-bleeds and would leave to wash off the blood. He would then return and complete his prayer. . (al-Muwatta')

beside a narration similarly to that from sunan ibn Majah in sunan ad-Daraqotni (see here in Arabic). So via analogy they conclude that to whom "hadath" (loosing the taharah which necessitates wudu' only) occurred he may perform wudu' and go back to his prayer and continue from where he stopped as long as he didn't speak to anybody.

Imam an-Nawawi said in his al-Majmo' المجموع شرح المهذب- commenting this hadith:

Abu Haneefah, Ibn Abi Layla and al-Awzaa‘i said: He may continue his prayer from where he left off. This was narrated by Ibn az-Zabbaagh and others from ‘Umar ibn al-Khattaab, ‘Ali and Ibn ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with them). It was also narrated by al-Bayhaqi from ‘Ali, Salmaan al-Faarisi, Ibn ‘Abbaas, Ibn ‘Umar, Ibn al-Musayyab, Abu Salamah ibn ‘Abd ar-Rahmaan, ‘Ata’, Tawoos, Abu Idrees al-Khawlaani, Sulaymaan ibn Yazaar and others (may Allah be pleased with them). The author mentioned in brief the evidence for both views, but the hadeeth is da‘eef. The Sahaabah (may Allah be pleased with them) differed concerning this issue, so the matter may be resolved on the basis of analogy. And Allah knows best. (Spurce of the translation islamqa #129666)

See for example in ibn Humam's Fath al-Qadir فتح القدير -in Arabic-. According to ibn al-Jaziri's the Islamic Jurisprudence according to the four Sunni schools p.400 if something happened that invalidates wudu' it only invalidates prayer if it was long enough before the final tashahud as the length of it.