Muslim Prayer

Pious Muslims pray five times a day; all Muslims should but not all Muslims are pious Muslims. Like people of other religions they do not always live up to the obligations of their faith. In particular younger people may be amiss in fulfilling their religious duties. They live much more in a culturally divided world than their parents who, it is said, tend to feel foremost at home in their culture of origin. Control of the mosques is in the hands of the older generation and young people often have little affinity with them. This may explain the fact that it is mostly middle-aged and elderly men who pass by our window five times a day on their way to the mosque nearly opposite our house.

This being said, one should not underestimate the power of prayer. It gives structure to the lives of pious Muslims by dividing their day into five fixed points, around which their day revolves. The hours are compulsory and cannot be changed at will. This does not mean that all pray at the same time to the minute. I often see men still entering the mosque for prayer while others are already on their way out.

Muslim prayer is very much an individual act of piety, even where many Muslims are together in the same mosque praying at more or less the same time. One Muslim I met at an interfaith meeting last year - and he had me thinking about it ever since - expressed his experience in this way: "Prayer gives me the opportunity to stand before the Almighty with nothing in between; it is paradise in front and hell at the back".

I am not sure whether I get him right, but he seems to express an experience that is not alien to me as a Christian either. When you are blessed in prayer with a deep awareness of God, as sometimes is the case, you know that you are face to face with the Absolute One, with Life and Happiness in person. Cut off from Him or Her you fall in an abyss of darkness and nothingness.

Ton