Five Prayers in a Day

So the second pillar, which is prayer, is trying to connect people to God — to put people into a state in which they are connected. Now how is that done? It is done by obligating prayer. Prayer is not a choice in Islam. There are prayers that one can do out of choice, but there are prayers that one has to submit to. So again the idea of submission comes into the idea of praying. The Muslim submits to five prayers a day; that is something to which he submits. That is a rule: he is being told, pray five times a day; and he can either say, no, I do not want to pray; or else say, yes, this is going to be prayed — recognising that this is an obligation binding on him. And that is belief in Islam. Now there are many Muslims who do not pray anyway, which is another matter; and again, it is like anybody who does not follow their tradition: they still might believe in it, they are just not practising it.

Now the prayer: there are five prayers in a day, and this is based on an equatorial day. Picture it as a circle: here is sunset, and here is sundown;^* here is the meridian point, and here is the midnight point. So this half is day, and this half is night. Now, the first prayer begins at dawn — for people, normally: if one asks what the first prayer is, most people will say the dawn prayer. In reality the first prayer, according to the Muslims, is the sunset prayer. People who know the Jewish tradition are familiar with the fact that the day begins at sunset; this is the same in the Islamic tradition. The day begins at sunset because it is based on a lunar month: the month begins at the sighting of the new moon for the Muslims, and the lunar month begins with sunset — that is the first time that the moon is visible when it is new. Now this prayer has a short window: it lasts until the red is gone out of the sky. That is the time for maghrib, so Muslims are supposed to pray it very quickly.

Now it is interesting that the Qurʾān says in many places that the two ends of the day are the times when people should remember God — particularly these two ends, the dawn and the sunset. And something that many people notice, and the Muslims take it as one of these aspects that they take from the Qurʾān, of everything being in praise, is that oftentimes animals gather at those periods. Birds gather at sunset, and they gather in the early part before the sunrise, and chirp away; they literally gather and congregate during that time and chirp away. The crickets start in the evening; the frogs. These are all seen as literally praises — that is the way the Muslims view it. No doubt an evolutionary biologist would say the cricket is cooling himself off. But it is interesting: why do things in creation gather and do these things? The Muslims view them as really acts of praise.