Salat

Ṣalāt (, ) is the practice of prayer in Islam. It is one of the five most important duties for Sunni Muslims. To perform Salat, a person's mind must be ritually pure, which comes from ritual ablution, wuḍūʾ, or the washing and cleansing of his or her body. The salat is observed threeJafarli, Durdana. "The historical conditions for the emergence of the Quranist movement in Egypt in the 19th-20th centuries." МОВА І КУЛЬТУРА (2017): 91. or (most commonly) five times every day at prescribed times, depending on the sect.
Salawat is plural, and Salat is singular.

Name
Salat is an Arabic word that means to pray. Outside the Arab world, the most widespread and common term is the Persian word namāz.

Sunni
For Sunni Muslims, salat must be performed at five periods each day. These periods are measured according to the Sun’s movement. The call to prayer is essential before every obligatory prayers. Muhammad said: "The one who responds to Azan out of faith and seeking Allah's pleasure will be admitted to paradise."

In the ritual prayers each Muslim is in direct contact with Allah. There is no need of a priest as a middleman (While there is a prayer leader in the mosque - the imam - they are not a priest, but simply a person who knows a great deal about Islam.) Muslims can pray anywhere, but it is especially good to pray with others in a mosque. Praying together in a congregation helps Muslims to realise that all humanity is one, and all are equal in the sight of Allah. The prayer ritual, which is over 1400 years old, is repeated five times a day by hundreds of millions of people all round the world.Gruber, Christiane. "The Ilkhanid Mi‛ rājnāma as an illustrated Sunni prayer manual." The Prophet's Ascension. Cross-Cultural Encounters with the Islamic Mirāj Tales, hrsg. v. ders. u. Frederick Colby, Bloomington/Indianapolis 2010b (2010): 27-49.

 Shia 
There are different subsets of Shia Islam. Some of them pray 3 times combined, others 5 times. Allah does not need human prayers because he has no needs at all. Muslims pray because God has told them that they are to do this, and because they believe that they obtain great benefit in doing so.

 Hadith rejectors and Quranists 
Most Hadith rejectors pray two units of Salat three times a day, deriving this structure from their interpretation of Qur'anic verses.https://siblingsofilm.com/hadith-rejectors-arguments-obstacles/ 

Quranists who follow the Ahl al-Qur'an movement founded by Ahmed Subhy Mansour and members of the Submitters movement founded by Rashad Khalifa (d. 1990 CE) perform five daily prayers.https://www.ahl-alquran.com/arabic/show_article.php?main_id=15303https://masjidtucson.org/publications/books/sp/1994/apr/page3.html They claim that acts of worship—including the five daily Salat and the Hajj—were preserved through consecutive generational practice rather than through reliance on written hadith collections.https://www.ahl-alquran.com/arabic/show_article.php?main_id=15303https://thesubmitters.org/principles-of-muslim-prayer/

The Bida'iyya, a branch of the extremist Kharijite sect known as the Azariqa—emerging specifically through the sub-lineage of the Khazimiyya—rejected the five prayers and prayed only two or three times a day. Ibn Hazm (d. 1064 CE) also credits this practise to another Azariqa offshoot known as the Bittikhiyya (or Batihiyya). The Bida'iyya further rejected the hadith altogether.https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pCiQDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA183&dq=Azariqa+rejected+two+of+the+five+prayers+and+kept+only+three.&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiByvWzlumSAxUtVEEAHfLVBsgQ6AF6BAgIEAM#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttps://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA473923105&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00030279&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E988a896&aty=open-web-entry

 Ritual washing 
Muslims must be clean before they pray. They make sure of this by performing ritual washing, called wudhu. Mosques have washing facilities for Muslims to clean their body before they begin prayer.

References


Category:Worship