What Prayer Means

Looking, then, at prayer — ṣalāh. Much of this subject is not covered here, because it is to be done in detail in the chapter on īmān; but the word in Arabic is a word that comes from a root word that can mean a few things. One of them is to burn up: the idea that prayer burns up wrong actions. That is one of the meanings. Another root meaning is a connection, a ṣilah, a connection with God: that prayer is a connection with God. Another idea of the prayer is submission itself: that the prayer is a form of submission.

Now the idea in the Qurʾān about prayer is that all peoples and all creatures have been given a prayer. In 22:18 it says: have you not seen that all prostrate to Allah — all things that are in the heavens and the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the hills, the trees, the animals, and a great number among mankind; but a great number are also such as unto whom the chastisement is justly due.

So here is an idea that everything is prostrating; everything is in a state of prostration — the heavens, the earth, the mountains, the trees — that everything is worshipping. This is something in the Qurʾān: it says everything is glorifying God, but you do not hear its glorification.

There is a tradition that the Prophet Muhammad picked up some rocks, pebbles, in his hand, and he held them out, and some of his companions heard the rocks glorifying God; and then he put them away. So the point is that that was an example, in the Muslim tradition, of the Prophet showing people that everything is in glorification.

Now it should be noticed that when the verse gets to man, it changes the way it speaks. It says: and a great number from humankind. This is where the Qurʾān introduces the idea of free will. Not everybody — unlike the rest of creation, not all human beings are in a state of awareness. So only a great number of people are even aware; many people are in heedlessness of prayer itself, or of the fact that they should be worshipping. So there is an idea in the Muslim tradition that we as human beings can either be conscious of our praising God, or we are in a type of unconscious state. And this goes back again to the idea that everything is in submission, willingly or unwillingly, and also wittingly or unwittingly. From the Muslim perspective, the body is in a state of worship; the heart is in a state of worship. The movement in and out of the heart, in Arabic, is called qabḍ and basṭ: qabḍ is contraction, basṭ is expansion; and there are two names from the ninety-nine names of God, al-Qābiḍ and al-Bāsiṭ, the Contractor and the Expander. So the lungs are expanding and contracting; the pupils are expanding and contracting; the heart is expanding and contracting. The body is always moving in a state of expansion and contraction. And this again relates to the two dominant attributes — much more will be said about this under īmān — of majesty and beauty. Majesty is contraction; beauty is expansion. And these are the two dominant qualities, or characteristics, of creation, which are literally displaying for the human being an awareness of God's presence in His creation.