Reconnecting & Rethinking: Salah

Our halaqas (group discussions) are based on the idea that we cannot know Allah, or Islam, if we do not know ourselves. How humanity experiences the divine is a key part of how we understand the divine[i]. At our halaqa in July (2024), we discussed Salah, ritual prayer and used these questions to guide the discussion:

• How does the notion of prayer as an obligation impact our ability to connect with Allah and ourselves?
• How do punitive ideas on prayer from our childhoods affect how we pray now?
• The ways maturing our understanding of prayer and embracing its complexity can release us from the overwhelm that can come with Islamic prayer practice.
• How does prayer serve us? If the essence of prayer is communication with God, what agency do we have over this? What is the difference between du’a and salah and ibadah

This halaqa brought together a very diverse group of Muslims with different experiences of Islam, Muslim communities and mosques. Below we’ve shared perspectives from Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Sufi Muslims, Somali Muslims, Egyptian Muslims, South Asian Muslims, neurodivergent Muslims, Muslims who converted to Islam and Muslims who were raised in Muslim households. The Muslims who contributed to this discussion include cis and trans women, gender non-confirming Muslims, nonbinary and genderqueer Muslims, trans and cis men.

Here’s what we learnt and below are some of the references we used:

The Function and Experience of Salah

• Our efforts to rethink salah shows a desire to reconnect with it. Often Muslims questioning how and why we are told to pray are treated as if we are saying something blasphemous. But actually, a desire to rethink the parts of Islam that are challenging to us demonstrates a desire to stay connected and acknowledge the challenges rather than abandon what we find difficult.
• One participant shared: “I can chastise myself for my ‘laziness’ about salah but at the same time I know that if I show up on the mat, even just once a day, something is bringing me to salah and it reminds me of the hadith – ‘if they come to me walking, I go to them at speed’[iii]. – If I move myself to the religion, it moves itself to me.”
• Salah can be a radical way to disrupt the status quo. It shuns capitalist productivity norms, connects us to the phases of the night and the day,[ii] it reminds us that we are part of Allah swt’s wider creation despite the pressure to naval gaze and individualise our lives. Congregational prayer is a more explicit way of reminding us to recognise one another and accept our differences.

Experiences of marginalised Muslims in mosques

• In practice this is hampered by racism and the reality of how safe we are or are not in congregational spaces. One attendee shared: “As a masculine presenting woman, it always felt strange that I would honour that hard-won part of my identity outside but feel the need to wear a hijab and jilbab/ other similar garments when attending the mosque. There was of course pressure from other aunties and ‘knowledgeable Muslim women’ who had a lot to say on my attire. The fact that I would go to the mosque in baggy jeans and jumpers- and also being Black- meant that my body acted as a canvas for intrusive questions, talking at me instead of to me, and seeking to remind me of how much The Prophet loved Bilal and how there is no racism in Islam….All I wanted to do was pray in community and feel closer to Allah. ‘Arabisation’ and ‘South-Asianisation’ are additional components at play when speaking about namaz. Our embodied flesh dictates much of our experience.”
• Because there are many more Sunni mosques in the UK than Shia mosques, Shia Muslims often find themselves praying in Sunni mosques where there is an inevitability that the way we pray will be ‘corrected’ unnecessarily by Sunni Muslims. The assumption that the way one group of Muslims prays is the only way that Allah will accept prayers, is an act of supremacy. Some of the Shia Muslims at the halaqa talked about the need to pretend to be one type of Muslim outside and another type at home and what this does to our sense of self because of the domination of Sunni Muslims and their practices.
• Community members with OCD shared how the focus on numbers of prayer/units of prayer and the repetitive actions and rituals that come with salah like wudu (ablution) can trigger obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviours. One person shared how fearful these experiences had caused them to stop praying. Once they’d worked through the fear of salah they were able to re-engage with it. This also reflects some of the discussion we had about fasting in Ramadan where community members shared that any discussion on mental health became about whether or not they had an exemption from the ritual rather than a more thoughtful conversation about ways to engage, embedding the idea that ritual practice is all or nothing and how excluding this experience is.
• Some neurodivergent Muslims talked about how, for some people, that makes it much harder to engage with rituals that feel meaningless and sometimes means that what feels meaningless needs to be rejected. Finding meaning in salah and understanding its function can help with this but that can’t be done under pressure or through shame. And allowing ourselves to reject something that feels meaningless can be part of embracing our neurodivergence.  They also talked about difficulty focusing and the sensory experience of praying in congregation. In Islam, even without knowing the meaning of the words we’re saying, vocalising and embodying prayer is a significant act of worship but that doesn’t necessarily meet the threshold that many neurodivergent people have to feel an act is sincerely meaningful enough to engage in.

Our childhood experiences of salah impact how we view prayer as adults

• Our family’s attitude to prayer plays a huge role in how we understand and relate to this ritual act as adults. People shared their experiences of belonging to families who conformed to the expectations from their communities around prayer and families who didn’t. The latter experienced the scrutiny and judgement that came with non-conformity. 
• Pressure from family to pray also shapes what role God or divinity has in our prayer practice. Lots of people related to anecdotes about being pushed to pray by parents when they were children and subsequently sneaking into bathrooms and bedrooms to bide time until it appeared they had prayed. The lack of desire to engage with kids about prayer or entertain the philosophical questions that children have can make kids feel unheard and irrelevant yet beholden to practice they don’t understand or care about. This can be reflected in our adulthood unless we make time to hear ourselves and treat our complex feelings about salah as relevant.
• This reflects something that other community members have shared at our other events. Namely, that for some Muslims, religious practice is something that is done and preserved, not really something to be reflected on, questioned or intellectualised. They are no less Muslim and don’t deserve derision or condescension. Religion simply has a different function for them.
• Praying in environments that challenge our sense of social justice can feel like an act of acceptance or compliance with something we know to cause pain and injustice. Especially in places where gender segregation is normalised which can trigger pain around how we show up in our bodies especially for Muslims who are gender non-confirming, non-binary, genderqueer or trans.

Different forms of worship in Islam

• One person asked: “When you have love for God, why can’t prayer be organic, why does it have to be this specific ritual with movements and specific words?” Other people also agreed that they felt more connected to Allah in parts of their day when they weren’t praying. In Islam we have forms of spontaneous worship called ibadah and du’a. Ibadah is a broad term usually translated as ‘worship’ but can also mean ‘service to God’. It includes doing things (taking action) intentionally and avoiding things intentionally. The concept of Ibadah includes what we do in our minds and with our emotions. It is linked to engaging in the good and abstaining from things that are unjust including things that are an injustice to us as individuals and communities. The concept of Ibadah includes Salah (ritual prayer): Salah is a specific type of Ibadah with prescribed postures, recitations, and timings performed multiple times per day and this varies between Muslim communities. Du’a (supplication) is another form of Ibadah, but it’s a more personal and open-ended communication with Allah. You can make du’a at any time, in any language, for anything. How we use du’a, what we ask Allah for is a window into who we are as individuals. Communal du’a is also a huge part of worship, particularly in Shia Muslim communities. It can be a form of devotion to Allah and can be used to honour his creation. Similarly dhikr is a form of worship. It is the repetition of specific phrases, sometimes the names of Allah, sometimes exalting Allah e.g. ‘subhanallah’ – glory be to Allah. So connection to and communication with Allah  can take many forms depending on what the moment calls for.
• A revert to Islam in the group shared how attracted they were to the idea of praying five times a day because it was an opportunity to practice discipline. For some people discipline like this has benefits e.g. reminding us that we can do hard things and shape our understanding of ourselves.  

[i] Surah 49 verse 13 Ahmed Hulusi translation – O people…Indeed, we have (always) created you from a male and a female (no stated exception here for Adam alayhi as salaam); and made you into races-nations and communities so that you may come to know (and acquire different qualities and virtues from) each other…Indeed, the noblest of you in the sight of Allah are those who are true to themselves (their essential reality). Indeed, Allah is the Aleem, the Habir.

Surah 49 verse 13 Laleh Bakhtiar translation – O humanity! Truly, We created you from a male and female and made you into peoples and types that you recognise one another. Truly, the most generous of you with God is the most devour. Truly God is Knowing, Aware.

[ii] “So, establish prayer (salat) at the time the sun sets in the west until the darkness of the night. Also, the Quran of the dawn (the morning prayer) …” (17:78 Hulusi translation)

“Perform the formal prayer from the sinking sun until the darkening of the night and the recital at dawn. Truly the dawn recital had been on that is witnessed (17:78 Bakhtiar translation)

[iii] Allah the Almighty said: “I am as My servant thinks I am (1). I am with them when they make mention of Me. If they make mention of Me to themself, I make mention of them to Myself; and if they make mention of Me in an assembly, I make mention of them in an assembly better than it. And if they draw near to Me an arm’s length, I draw near to them a cubit, and if they draw near to Me a cubit, I draw near to them a fathom. And if they come to Me walking, I go to them at speed.” (Pronouns changed from ‘he’ to ‘them’ in relation to  humans) Related by al-Buhkari (also by Muslim, at-Tirmidhi and Ibn-Majah). Another possible rendering of the Arabic is: “I am as My servant expects Me to be”.

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