Pray Tell? Five Times a Day I Find the Time & Place
On the Muslim Ritual of Prayer
What do you think of when you hear the word prayer? What do you see in your mind’s eye? Is it a person with their eyes closed, palms together, asking God for something? For most Muslims around the world, that is what we call dua, a supplication to God. Ya Allah, we might say, help me ace that job interview. Or Ya Allah, keep my family healthy.
When we say prayer, though, we mean something else. We mean the highly ritualized worship we undertake, according to the command God gave the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) to pass along to his adherents.
My prayers revolve around the revolution of the Earth. That’s not just a play on words, it’s a highly scientific phrase with a very specific meaning. As a Muslim, I am obliged to pray 5 times over the course of my day, at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and night. There are whole schedules and tables made for prayer times in every city and town around the globe. When we were little, we had one stuck to our fridge with a magnet. Now, we use an app.
There is so much to be said about prayer. The calm and peace it exudes when done properly, the meditative nature, the connection to God. There are layers and layers to explore, and they can’t all be covered in one little essay. This essay though, is not focusing on the mental health benefits of prayer. This essay is about the logistics of life as a prayerful person in a world where worship is forgotten or cast aside.
Muslim prayer — called salah — is a biggie. It’s the second pillar of our religion, coming only after bearing witness that there is only one God, and that Prophet Muhammad is his final messenger. In majority Muslim countries, it’s easier to keep up with prayer because the infrastructure is there to support it. Mosques are dotted all over the city, calling out the athaan from loudspeakers that echo in the streets. If you’re out shopping, have no fear! The malls have prayer halls. In the Dubai Mall I visited with my sister last month, there were at least 5 prayer halls placed throughout, with roughly the same regularity as restrooms. Muslims can pray anywhere, so it’s not uncommon to see people praying in parks, or for the crowd to spill out of a mosque onto the streets on big occasions, such as our Eid holiday. I have been in the marketplace in Egypt, at a vendor’s stall, when the athaan is called from a nearby mosque, and watched the vendor pull out a prayer rug right then and there. Then, we all prayed in congregation.
In Canada, where I am at home, none of this is common. Mosques are few and far between. Muslims have the same busy schedules and go-go-go lifestyles as our neighbours, but we have the added element of finding a moment and a place to perform our prayers.
Just about every Western Muslim I know has pulled off the dressing room salah while shopping. It goes like this: you look at your watch and realize you have maybe an hour left before your time runs out for one of the middle prayers (noon, afternoon, or sunset). A quick calculation tells you that you won’t be home on time to catch it. You walk into whichever store in the mall has the widest dressing rooms and least earsplitting music. You grab a shirt, a pair of pants, a sweater off the rack and go to “try stuff on”. Bonus points here if you realize you may need more items to spend the five minutes needed in the stall. Sometimes, the dressing room salah actually translates into a new purchase if you like one of the items you grabbed!
In uni, we had a designated multi-faith meditation room on the third floor of a science and tech building. The Muslim Students Association club-house across the street from the main campus also served as a prayer space. While this was helpful when my schedule was wide open, most days, I had back-to-back classes across campus, with barely the time to get from one lecture hall to another. Prayer windows can last 4 to 5 hours in the summer, when the days are long, and barely 90 minutes when the days are short. And so many of us would find hidden nooks on our path across campus to pray. Sometimes, these were little-used hallways or empty classrooms. A popular prayer spot was the corner under the stairs in the basement stairwell of the old engineering building. It was common to find a roll of brown paper towel in the corner, swiped from the nearest washroom. The towel was multi-purpose: to dry any slush or wetness dragged in by the rain and snow, and to put down as an impromptu prayer mat before we put our heads down in sujood, the most significant part of our salah. I can still hear the echoes of footfalls on the metal stairs above me as students rushed to and from their classes, the clanging of the heavy doors to the basement hallways.
At the office, I now step into a quiet room and put a little hotel “do not disturb” sign over the doorknob. Years ago, there was no quiet room, so I would simply pray in my cubicle, laying a cardigan down as my prayer mat. Before I started doing this regularly, I explained to my co-workers what was happening, that I would take 5 minutes and that I wouldn’t be able to talk to them during that time. I would wait until everyone was quiet, busy with independent work, and get started. Somehow, my nextdoor cubicle neighbour, who had been silent for at least 15 minutes, would suddenly have a question for me. “Noha,” she would call out. “Noha? Noha? Are you there?” My friend Nadine across the hall would inevitably come to my rescue. “She’s praying, Angie! She told us, remember!” Nadine and I should have kept a will Angie interrupt Noha’s prayer? jar. We could have funded treats by the printer with it.
A non-exhaustive list of unexpected places I have prayed:
In hallways and stairwells
In the car, in any parking lot
In quiet gates at the airport between flights
On airplanes - timing myself between bathroom trips for my neighbours and flight attendants passing with food and drinks.
At the park, making sujood in the grass.
In empty boardrooms and classrooms
Muslims praying in random places is such a phenomenon that Muslim Canadian singer-songwriter Daoud Wharnsby even has a song about it:
It’s an unfortunate fact that in the countries where few understand Muslim prayer, we have fewer places to pray, which makes us need to do it out in the open where lots can happen. We can be interrupted by well-meaning but concerned bystanders. They see us standing or sitting there making odd motions, try to talk to us, and then get worried when we won’t respond. Other times, it’s a little more insidious, and a racist person doesn’t like what he sees. In those cases, I hope for a comment and nothing more.
Five prayers a day may seem like a lot to some people, but those are only the obligatory prayers. There are sunnah prayers as well, optional prayers which the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) performed regularly. Not only that, but the number could have been much higher. Muslims believe that God mandated prayer on the Prophet’s miraculous journey to the heavens, where he (Muhammad) met many of the Prophets that came before him. Originally, God mandated 50 obligatory prayers, but the Prophet Moses told Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon them both) to go back and ask for fewer, that the burden on his people would be too high.
We pray because God commanded us to, but we also pray because it’s grounding, because it forces us to stop and reconnect to our higher purpose. Prayer is a form of meditation, an exercise in mindfulness and centering ourselves in the moment, away from our worries and our to-do lists and our productivity-obsessed society. And if we can’t get away from our worries, we take our worries with us to God. And in our prayers, we make dua for God to give us peace: peace of mind, peace on earth, peace from conflict, peace in justice.
A piece I wrote about six weeks ago about the first prayer of the day, the fajr prayer. Fajr means dawn in Arabic.
So if you happen to walk into a boardroom or a classroom, and you see someone going through motions you don’t quite understand, give them a minute or two to finish up. They’re in conversation with God. It won’t be long. They’ll check in again in a couple of hours.
Do you pray in public? What does your prayer look like?
Some resources for anyone more curious about Salah:
Basic definition of Salah: Salah - Wikipedia
Salah in pictures - a cool resource from the BBC showing the steps and movements in Salah: BBC - Religion & Ethics - In pictures: Muslim prayer movements.
Sujood - the most integral act of the Islamic prayer: Sujud - Wikipedia
During Salah, Muslims recite from our holy book, the Quran, which is the word of God as revealed to Prophet Muhammad. A great English translation of the Quran is The Clear Quran, which can be found here: https://www.clearquran.com
I love how you are informing the reader, yet with a beautiful conscious. I especially love the imagery of praying under the metal stairs while people are people walking over you. I can’t think of a more humble place for Prayer to take place. Thank you for sharing this with us.
I'm not Muslim, but I too belong to an Abrahamic faith. I'm Catholic (yes, I am well aware of the damage to the world and human beings my religious institution has caused though throughout the centuries and today). I know cloistered nuns and monks do a structured prayer ritual throughout the day, but lay Catholic are not required to. Nonethelss, I pray silently throughout the day. In the morning I say simple prayers of gratitude and guidance along with a prayer for a protective spiritual hedge when I drive to and from work around me, my fellow drivers and their passengers, and pedestrians. I talk to God throughout the day especially if I am overwhelmed, grateful or anxious. I agree with Elif Shafak and Yates that writing is also a form of prayer. I don't pray my rosary beads or chaplet in public but I do have an Audible book recording of the rosary that I can listen to in private and public if I am on public transit.