Salat (Daily Prayer)

Salat, the five daily prayers, is the second of the Five Pillars of Islam and the act of worship the Quran commands most insistently, though the number five and the details of posture come from the practice (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad rather than from the text alone. The prayers fall at dawn, midday, mid-afternoon, sunset and night, and each is a fixed cycle of standing, bowing, and prostration (sujud), performed facing the Kaaba in Mecca after ritual ablution and the call to prayer.

Its discipline is corporate even when performed alone: the times, the direction, the words (opening with the Fatiha, the first sura) and the movements are shared across the Muslim world, so that the rite binds the individual body into a single orientation and schedule. Friday's midday prayer is congregational and carries a sermon. The theological weight the tradition places on it is heavy, a hadith calls it the first deed a person will be asked about on the Day of Judgement, and its five-fold recurrence is understood to keep the remembrance of God threaded through the ordinary hours of the day.

The Quran commands prayer repeatedly but does not itself specify five daily prayers at fixed times with a set sequence of postures; that structure was worked out in the earliest generation of Muslims and is transmitted mainly through hadith, reports of the Prophet's own practice, rather than through Quranic legislation alone. The best known account of how the number five was fixed is the Night Journey and Ascension, in which Muhammad is said to have been instructed to require fifty prayers a day, later reduced to five after repeated appeals, a story found in the hadith collections rather than in the Quran's own text.

The call to prayer, the adhan, has its own separate origin story: companions reportedly proposed a bell like the Christians or a horn like the Jews before Muhammad accepted a companion's dream of a human voice calling the words instead. Details of posture, wording, and timing were then elaborated by the classical legal schools, which is why Sunni and Shia practice differs visibly today, most noticeably in Shia communities commonly combining the five prayers into three sessions, a position they trace to the Prophet's own practice on grounds Sunni jurists dispute. Congregational Friday prayer, with its sermon, developed as a distinct weekly institution alongside the five daily prayers rather than replacing any of them.