The Five Pillars

The five are usually listed and less often examined as a system. What they have in common is that four of them are actions with public and measurable form, and the fifth is a sentence.

The shahada is the only one that is purely verbal, and it functions as the point of entry: saying it sincerely before witnesses makes a person Muslim. There is no ritual of initiation, no officiant required and no institution to join, which is a genuinely distinctive feature among the large religions and goes some way to explaining the speed of Islamic expansion in its first centuries.

The other four distribute obligation across every timescale a human life has. Salat structures the day, zakat the year, sawm the calendar month of Ramadan, and hajj a lifetime. That is a tidier arrangement than most traditions manage, and it is one reason the framework is taught to children as a structure rather than as a list of duties.

Three of the five are also collective by design. Friday prayer requires a congregation and cannot be performed alone. Ramadan is kept simultaneously by everyone in a community, which visibly reshapes the working day, the restaurant trade and the broadcast schedule in Muslim-majority countries. The hajj assembles people from every country in identical unsewn cloth in the same place in the same week, and its levelling function, the same two garments on the wealthy and the poor, is stated explicitly in the tradition rather than inferred by observers.

Zakat is the one with a number in it, which makes compliance auditable in a way piety usually is not. Hajj is the one with a condition: it is owed only by those with the physical and financial means, and borrowing in order to perform it is discouraged.

The pillars are a framework for worship, not a summary of Islam, and a good deal of what Muslims do and argue about is not in them.

The most discussed omission is jihad, which some early authorities and some modern movements have described as a sixth pillar without that view ever becoming standard. The mainstream Sunni position keeps the five and treats striving, in its several senses, as an obligation of a different order rather than as part of this particular structure.

The framework is also Sunni in its formulation, and this is frequently missed. Twelver Shia Islam organises the same material differently, distinguishing the roots of religion, divine unity, divine justice, prophethood, the imamate and the resurrection, from the branches, a longer list of practices that includes prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and zakat but adds khums, a separate fifth of surplus income paid to religious authorities and to descendants of the Prophet, along with enjoining good, forbidding wrong, and prescribed loyalty and dissociation. Ismaili communities differ again. Presenting the five pillars as Islam without qualification therefore describes the majority accurately and a very substantial minority inaccurately.

What the pillars do not include at all is the greater part of Islamic law: marriage, divorce, inheritance, commerce, food, dress, and the whole apparatus of jurisprudence governing them, which is where most scholarly effort has always gone. Nor do they include the ethical material that occupies most Muslim preaching, or the devotional practices, dhikr, recitation, visiting shrines, that occupy much of Muslim religious life. The pillars are the skeleton of worship rather than the body of the religion, and Muslim scholars have consistently said so.