There are two main forms of prayer in Islam. Liturgical prayer (salat), one of Islam’s Five pillars, is the primary form of public worship, requiring the believer to pray in Arabic, the language of divine speech, drawn from the Quran. Salat must be performed facing toward the kaaba in mecca (the qibla direction, because it is believed by Muslims to be God’s sacred “house”) five times daily: dawn (fajr), noon (zuhr), afternoon (asr), sunset (maghrib), and night (isha). Each time of prayer is preceded and announced by the call to prayer (adhan) summoning believers to the mosqUe (Q 50:39–41). The number and times of salat are not fully set in the Quran, but became established during Prophet mUhammad’s lifetime based on his sUnna (customary behavior), as recorded in the hadith.
The quintessential prayer gesture is the prostration (sujud) in which the believer first bows from a standing position, kneels, and leans forward touching forehead to the ground. Muslims are defined in the Quran as “those who prostrate themselves” (Q 48:29), and the mosque is the “place of prostration” (masjid). Since prayer involves no sitting, mosques traditionally are open spaces having no seating or pews, only carpeting or matting on which to stand, kneel, and prostrate, along with a pulpit (minbar) for Friday noon sermons, and a niche (mihrab) indicating the direction of prayer (qibla). In order to be ready to pray, the believer must be ritually pure, requiring ablUtion of the hands, arms, face, and feet (wudu), or a full bath (ghusl) after menses or sexual relations (Q 5:6, 9).
The dress code for prayer requires modesty, minimally for men covering from navel to knees, and for Women from neck to ankles, usually including a scarf covering the hair. Liturgical prayer in Islam can be performed in any clean location. Thus, Muslims can do salat in their homes, at their jobs, in the street, as well as in the conventional location of the mosque. Salat can be performed alone or in a group organized in rows led by an imam (prayer leader). Although all prayer times are considered obligatory, attending the Friday (jumaa) noon prayer time is considered especially meritorious; men are particularly encouraged to participate collectively in this prayer at the mosque. Although the Prophet’s hadith encourages Muslim women to pray in the home, women are not forbidden from praying at the mosque. When they join men in the mosque, prayer is traditionally sexually segregated, women praying behind the men, or to one side, in a balcony or other separate space. The reason given is to prevent inappropriate sexual distraction from prayer. Some mosques in the West or in more liberal Islamic communities no longer practice sexual segregation in prayer.
The second form of prayer is personal prayer (duaa), which is voluntary and additional to the five times daily salat prayers. Personal prayer allows believers to be creative and spontaneous in their own native language instead of the Arabic of formal prayer (only about 10 percent of Muslims around the world are native Arabic speakers). The believer can ask for specific needs or wants from God on their own behalf or on behalf of family and community. Believers have often used prayers from collections authored by devout believers and scholars and handed down from generation to generation as prayer manuals. Although Islam has no formal system of intercession—no priesthood or formal hierarchy to mediate between believers and God—it does have a strong popular tradition of informal intercession (wasila, Q 5:34, 17:57) via holy persons, places, and objects. There are prayers for blessings on Muhammad and his immediate family, the Sufi saints, and Shii Imams; local pilgrimage (ziyara) and prayers offered at the birth and death places and tombs of holy persons; and objects that convey divine blessing (baraka) such as quranic prayers written, embroidered, and carved functioning as amulets and talismans.
Ablution the Symbol of Cleanliness in Islam
