page_title: Salah
section_title: Differences in practice
hierarchical_section_title: Salah / Differences in practice
caption_attribution_description: a Turbah or Mohr from Qom, Iran. It shows a prayer to Fatimah, daughter of the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, and mother of the third Shi'a Imam, Husayn ibn Ali. It reads: "Ya Fatima al-Zahra" which translates as: "Oh, Fatima, the Splendid One"
context_page_description: Salah or Salat among most non-Arab Muslims, is the second of the five pillars in the Islamic faith as daily obligatory standardized prayers. It is a physical, mental, and spiritual act of worship that is observed five times every day at prescribed times. While facing towards the Kaaba in Mecca, Muslims pray first standing and later kneeling or sitting on the ground, reciting from the Qur'an and glorifying and praising Allah as they bow and prostrate themselves in between. Ritual purity is a precondition.
  Salah is composed of repetitive cycles of bows and prostrations, divided into prescribed units called a rakʿah. The number of rakaʿahs varies according to the time of day.
context_section_description: Muslims believe that Muhammad practiced, taught, and disseminated the worship ritual in the whole community of Muslims and made it part of their life. The practice has, therefore, been concurrently and perpetually practiced by the community in each of the generations. The authority for the basic forms of the salah is neither the hadiths nor the Qur'an, but rather the consensus of Muslims.
  This is not inconsistent with another fact that Muslims have shown diversity in their practice since the earliest days of practice, so the salah practiced by one Muslim may differ from another's in minor details. In some cases the Hadith suggest some of this diversity of practice was known of and approved by the Prophet himself.
  Most differences arise because of different interpretations of the Islamic legal sources by the different schools of law (madhhabs) in Sunni Islam, and by different legal traditions within Shia Islam. In the case of ritual worship these differences are generally minor, and should rarely cause dispute.
caption: A turbah (Arabic: تربة ; Persian: مهر mohr) is a small piece of soil or clay, often a clay tablet, used during salat to symbolize earth. The use of a turbah is compulsory in most Shi'a schools of Islam, and disapproved among many Sunnis.[citation needed]
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