By: Alban Fejza, the Clarifying Messenger
Summary:
In this video, Alban Fejza reconstructs the Contact Prayer (Salat) using the Quran alone: he derives the body positions and their order, the words to be said in each position, the number of units for each of the five prayer times, the prayer times themselves, and the Shahada and salams that close the prayer, ending with a practical demonstration.
Video Transcript:
After 14 centuries of failed attempts by millions of scholars, God finally blessed us with a discovery in the Quran of all the details of the Muslim prayer, the Salat in Arabic, which means Contact Prayer. We will finally see in this video clarification how to reconstruct the Contact Prayer completely from the Quran. Thanks to God, for the first time in history, we have the privilege to understand why we do what we do and why we say what we say in the Contact Prayer, and all this will be presented to us using the Quran alone.
In this video we will see the list of commandments which lead to the complete reconstruction of the Contact Prayer, all from the Quran; the positions of prayer and their order, all from the Quran; the words which should be spoken during the prayer and when they should be said, all from the Quran; where we can find the number of units, the number of rak’as, for each prayer time, all from the Quran; how to find all the five prayer times, all from the Quran; the correct Shahada and where we can find the salams, all from the Quran; and finally, practical examples of doing all of these, all from the Quran.
It’s important to watch the whole video continuously, because the conclusions reached in the earlier portions of the video will be used to reach other conclusions in the later portions of the video.
So, the first thing we need to do to be able to reconstruct the Contact Prayer from the Quran is to list all the obligations found in the Quran which lead to the reconstruction of the Contact Prayer. Here we go.
There are two types of obligations in the Quran: one, conditional obligations; two, unconditional obligations. Conditional obligations in the Quran are obligations which emerge from the fact that a certain condition has been fulfilled. For example, you should test the orphans after they reach puberty, to see if they are mature enough to be given their property, but this is so only if you are their guardian. You should fast if it’s Ramadan in your location. You should mention God’s name, say “Bismillah,” if you eat. These are conditional obligations.
On the other hand, unconditional obligations are obligations which are obligatory the whole time. They are obligatory simply because you exist as God’s creature, which of course implies that you are alive, mentally and physically capable, fully aware, not dying from hunger or thirst, and not having to go to the bathroom at that moment, so that you are capable of that obligation. But no other conditions have to apply. Let’s call this “unconditional” for the purposes of this video. So basically, just imagine that you are living on some distant tropical island, with no wealth and no contact with any other human being, and the unconditional obligations would still apply in that case.
Here is a summarized list of those unconditional obligations. It includes mentioning God, glorifying God, magnifying God, praising God, expressing belief in the Last Day, expressing trust in God, addressing Him while hopeful and fearful, reciting the Quran, standing, prostrating, bowing, doing the Contact Prayer, and worshiping God. We will go over them one by one in more detail, but before we do that, we need to understand a crucial idea from the Quran which puts all these unconditional obligations in the correct perspective.
Here is the crucial idea. According to verses 9:85, 9:11 and 9:5, God did not reveal for us any rituals of worship except the Contact Prayer and Zakat. And since Zakat is conditional on your wealth, the only unconditional ritual of worship in the Quran is the Contact Prayer. And since the only unconditional ritual of worship in the Quran is the Contact Prayer, then all those other unconditional daily obligations must be part of the Contact Prayer; otherwise, the Quran would contradict itself. The only way that the Quran cannot contradict itself, when it tells us to do so many unconditional daily obligations while also telling us that the only unconditional ritual of worship is the Contact Prayer, is if all those unconditional daily obligations are part of the Contact Prayer.
So all we have to do is list those unconditional daily obligations and then arrange them according to how the Quran tells us to arrange them, and that is the Contact Prayer. To make it easier, let’s separate those unconditional daily obligations into body position obligations and speech obligations: what we have to do and what we have to say. Let’s start with body positions.
Before going over the body positions mentioned in the Quran, let’s get something out of our way by learning that where our hands are does not define those positions. The freedoms and limitations apply to our hands in all positions. The limitations for hand placements in the Quran are that we should not keep our shoulders too wide, because that’s a boastful position and it prevents other believers from joining us comfortably in the Contact Prayer. Also, we should not lift our shoulders up, and we should avoid the extremes, like stretching our hands all the way in any direction or withdrawing them all the way to our neck.
The Quran purposely allows us freedom within these limitations, so we can use our hands in whatever way we find helpful. For example, if we are praying outside and our hands got dusty after prostration, to avoid making our shirt dirty we can keep our hands on the side. Or if we are praying in the mosque, to leave more space for others on our sides, we can fold them in front. The Quran even allows us to use them to hold tools, or maybe a baby, or maybe a weapon, or to pull up our pants if needed, or to turn off the phone in our pocket if it rings when it shouldn’t, and the prayer is still acceptable.
During bowing, almost all people put their hands close to their knees, and during prostration almost all people put their hands on the ground, but this is because that is helpful to support their body weight, while being within the freedoms which the Quran allows for hand positions. So again, we just use them in whatever way we find helpful, while maintaining humbleness and fearing God.
Also, during the start of the prayer, although it is not a requirement, most people lift their hands like this, and the Quran indicates that this is an expression of emotional engagement, like an opera singer lifts his hands to immerse himself emotionally in the song. But as you noticed, unlike the opera singer, who might lift his shoulders as well, I’m keeping my shoulders lowered, within the limitations of the Quran, while lifting my hands, because there is no such limitation for the hands. The important thing to remember is that the Quran does not define the body positions by where our hands are. The positions are defined by where our head, body and legs are.
So now let’s present the body positions. The body positions mentioned in the Quran include standing, bowing, prostrating, sitting, and lying down on the sides. However, verse 4:43 of the Arabic Quran tells us that the Contact Prayer should not be done in the lying-down position. It’s a position where you can remember or mention God, but it’s not a Contact Prayer position, so let’s remove it. Now we are left with only four Contact Prayer positions.
Also, the sitting position is allowable if necessary, but we do not find it anywhere as obligatory in the Quran. It’s not obligatory because, while the other three positions require effort, and you get rewards for effort, sitting is described in the Quran as an effortless position, the position which is the opposite of striving, the opposite of making an effort. And because sitting is the no-effort position in the Quran, we should also try to minimize how long we stay in that position, because we get no rewards for it, unless we have to do something more important in that position. In the Contact Prayer, our target is to achieve the other positions. Sitting is not our target. We do it if necessary, to help us achieve the other targets faster, but the sitting itself is not one of the targets.
Now, before we talk about the order of these positions in the Contact Prayer, let’s first define them according to the Quran.
Standing: standing is when only the soles of our feet touch the ground and our back is vertical. We know this because this root word also means “people” in the Quran, which literally means those who stand vertically on two feet. Because this root word is used to name or distinguish the people through their distinct body position, and knowing that the only body position which people can do and animals cannot do is standing only on two feet, with nothing else touching the ground, while the back is completely vertical, straight, then this must be the position which the Quran is referring to when it mentions standing. This root word also means “straight,” so: standing up straight. It looks like this.
Bowing: bowing is allowed to be defined however the people define it, because the Quran tells us to bow with those who bow. And since this depends on people, any level of bending our backs while on our feet can potentially be bowing. But we have to do as much bowing as the others. If the others do a 90-degree bowing, we should also do a 90-degree bowing, and that looks like this. But it can also look like this, when others do it like that.
Prostrating: the definition of prostrating is when your face touches the floor. It looks like this.
Sitting: sitting obviously is when we use our behinds to support our weight. There are many ways to sit according to the Quran, but only the one which is closest to the prostrating position should be used in the Contact Prayer, because, as you will see later in the video, sitting only happens as a necessary step to exit and re-enter the prostrating position through the fastest nearby position. The sitting position which is closest to prostrating is this.
So, to summarize, the Contact Prayer positions include standing (obligatory), bowing (obligatory), prostrating (obligatory), and sitting (allowable when needed). But in what order should we go through these positions? Even the order can be found in the Quran.
If we look in the whole Quran, we find three rules which, when applied, give us a specific order of positions. Here are those rules from the Quran.
Rule number one: the starting position is the standing position. The Quran literally tells us to stand for the Contact Prayer, so we start the Contact Prayer with the standing position. This makes sense, because when you get ready for prayer, you have to walk to the place where you intend to do the prayer, and the walking puts you in the standing position first when you arrive there.
Rule number two: we should do each obligatory position twice. This is to prove that we did each of them on purpose, intentionally. The only way to prove that something was done on purpose, and not unintentionally or accidentally, is whether it was repeated. This is why Saul, when he told his soldiers not to drink water from the river so they would not get excluded from the army, actually did not exclude those who drank only one handful of water. It’s because he would not be able to prove that only one sip was intentional, but had they done it twice, then it must have been intentional.
This is why Moses, when the Israelite person asked for his help to finish the fight against the Egyptian, did not presuppose anything about his intentions. But once the Israelite person asked for his help the second time, to fight someone else, Moses allowed himself to conclude that the intentions of the Israelite person were evil. In both cases, God tells us that He does not hold us responsible for our unintentional deeds, but only for what is in our hearts. And the same root word, “heart,” mentioned in this verse also means “to return.” So if you return to the same old deed, doing it twice, then it was intentional, or in your heart. And then, just a few verses later, God asks us to only consider a divorce to be a true divorce if it was said twice, because if it was said only once, it could have been said unintentionally or half-heartedly.
This is also why God will resurrect us, recreate us, a second time. It’s to show everyone that our first creation was not an accident. He created us on purpose, and the proof of His intention is that He will create us a second time. God will repeat everything twice to show that everything He did was not an accident. Otherwise, Satan could claim that God’s first creation was an unintentional accident which randomly made Satan a victim, and because none of us, including the angels, have access to God’s intentions, Satan’s claim could not be proven wrong unless God creates everything twice to show that He created everything on purpose.
Similarly, we must repeat each of the obligatory positions twice to show purposeful intention, so that Satan and the disbelievers cannot claim on the Day of Resurrection that we went through these positions unintentionally or accidentally. You cannot have an accident happen in exactly the same way twice. When we prostrate, we must distinguish ourselves from someone who just tripped and fell down on his face. Also, on the Last Day, that person should not be able to claim that he was actually prostrating when he just fell. So we must repeat each of the three obligatory body positions twice to show that each of them was done on purpose.
Rule number three: we should always take the shortest untaken path. This is because the Quran, in verse 23:61, tells the believers to hasten to do good deeds, and the good deeds include doing these prayer positions. So we should take these positions in the fastest route possible, according to verse 23:61, which means that when we are trying to choose which next position to take, we should take the shortest untaken path.
To know which paths are shorter, let’s first present all the possible paths and their average lengths of time, so we can later choose between them. Here are all the possible paths, represented with arrows, and the time it takes to do them in seconds. Standing to bowing takes 1.23 seconds; bowing to standing, 1.23 seconds; standing to prostrating, 1.90 seconds.
As you can see in this graph, this path passes through the bowing position, because, as we learned earlier, bowing is flexibly defined in the Quran, which means that when you bend to go from the standing position to the prostrating position, you are necessarily bowing in between. The only way to go from standing to prostrating without bowing is to do a backflip, landing on your face first, which would cause damage and therefore not be allowed according to the Quran.
Prostrating back to standing also takes 1.90 seconds, and this again passes through the bowing position. Bowing to prostrating takes 1.40 seconds; prostrating to bowing, 1.40 seconds; bowing to sitting, 1.76 seconds; sitting to bowing, 1.76 seconds; prostrating to sitting, 1.17 seconds; sitting to prostrating, 1.17 seconds; standing to sitting, 2.70 seconds; and sitting to standing, 2.70 seconds. So these are all the possible paths and the time it takes to take them.
Now let’s apply these three Quranic rules, shown here on the right, to lead us through a specific path. We will use a red ball to represent where we are at every moment in that path. Rule one tells us to start with the standing position, so let’s start with standing. Now we have covered the standing position once. Then, according to rule three, we have to take the shortest untaken path. We have three potential paths from the standing position, and the shortest one is only 1.23 seconds; it leads to the bowing position, so let’s take that path. Now we have done the bowing position once.
From bowing, the shortest untaken path is actually the path which leads back to standing. Let’s take that path. Now we have covered the standing position twice. Then, from the standing position, the shortest untaken path is the path which leads to prostration. Let’s take that. As we go through that path, we necessarily pass through bowing, covering the bowing position twice, and then we reach the prostration position. Now we have covered the prostration position once.
So all we have to do now is cover the prostration position once more, and we will have covered all the obligatory positions twice, which is what rule number two asks us to do. So let’s take the shortest path from the prostration position so we can come back to prostration. The shortest path leads us to the sitting position, and from there the shortest path takes us back to prostration. Now we have covered all the obligatory positions of the Contact Prayer twice, and we have fulfilled rule number two.
So now we have fulfilled all three Quranic rules: starting from the standing position, we covered each obligatory position twice, through the shortest possible total path, and this led us to this exact order of positions. So by applying these three rules from the Quran, we ended up finding the exact order of the Contact Prayer. It starts with standing, then bowing, then standing again, then through bowing going to prostration, then sitting, then prostration again. This is what we call one unit of Contact Prayer.
Let’s represent it graphically, expanded, in the Quranic order which we found. We have standing, then bowing, then standing again, then bowing again, then prostrating, then sitting, and then prostrating again. And here is how it looks in practice: standing, bowing, standing again, then through bowing to prostrating, then sitting, so we can go back to prostrating.
These are seven positions, and this is what verse 15:87, among other things, means when it says, “We have given you the seven pairs, and the great Quran,” because, as you will see later, these seven positions must be repeated over and over throughout the believer’s life. But before we talk about the repetitions, let’s first talk about what we should say in these positions: the speech obligations.
The unconditional speech obligations which are found in the Arabic Quran are: reciting the Quran when standing for the Contact Prayer; mentioning God, at least early on, during standing for the Contact Prayer; praising God when we stand up; expressing belief in the Last Day; expressing trust in God; addressing Him while hopeful and fearful; glorifying God early and after prostration; and magnifying God for guiding us to fulfill the Qibla obligation, the Quran recitation obligation, and any other ritualistic step.
As you can see, for some of these speech obligations, the Quran explicitly specifies the body position where they should be fulfilled, and for others it doesn’t seem to specify the body position. However, for all the speech obligations where a specific body position is not explicitly mentioned, the rule in verse 23:61 still applies. The rule says that believers should hasten to do good deeds as early as possible, and the earliest possible time is the standing position in the Contact Prayer. So let’s divide these speech obligations into two groups: the ones which should be performed during the first Contact Prayer position, the standing position, and the ones which should be performed outside of it.
Let’s first deal with the first group, the speech obligations which should be performed during the standing position. This group includes reciting the Quran, mentioning God, praising God, expressing belief in the Last Day, expressing trust in God, and addressing Him while hopeful and fearful. As you have learned by now, according to the rule in verse 23:61, if we can find a way to fulfill these obligations fully in a faster way, in other words more efficiently, then we should do that. So is there a more efficient way to fulfill these obligations, instead of just going through them one by one? Aha, there is a way.
The first obligation presented here is to recite the Quran. So what if we find the sura in the Quran which, while reciting it, fulfills all the other obligations as well? And guess what: there is only one sura in the whole Quran which fulfills all these obligations. It’s Sura 1. Here is Sura 1. It says: “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to God, Lord of the universe. Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Master of the Day of Judgment. You alone we worship; You alone we ask for help. Guide us in the right path; the path of those whom You blessed; not of those who have deserved wrath, nor of the strayers.”
Now let’s confirm quickly how this sura fulfills all these speech obligations. We fulfill the obligation of mentioning God when we recite the first verse, which says, “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful,” and also verse 3, which says, “Most Gracious, Most Merciful.” We fulfill the obligation of praising God when we say, “Praise be to God, Lord of the universe.” We fulfill the obligation of expressing belief in the Last Day when we say, “Master of the Day of Judgment.” We fulfill the obligation of expressing trust in God when we say, “You alone we worship; You alone we ask for help.” We fulfill the obligation to address Him with hope when we say, “Guide us in the right path; the path of those whom You blessed.” And we fulfill the obligation to address Him fearfully when we say, “not of those who have deserved wrath, nor of the strayers.”
So as you can see, by reciting Sura 1 we not only fulfill the obligation to recite the Quran in the standing position, but also all the other obligations which should be fulfilled in the standing position. So we can replace all these speech obligations with only one speech obligation: recite Sura 1. Let’s place it in our graph where it belongs, here: recite Sura 1.
Also, because when we recite Sura 1 we fulfill the obligation to recite the Quran in the standing position, we are not obliged to recite any other suras, but we are also not prohibited from reciting other suras. Even the traditional scholars agree that the only sura which is obligatory to recite in the Contact Prayer is Sura 1, and they say that reciting other suras is just a recommendation. In the past, the believers with Muhammad did recite other suras as well, but you can learn in another of our videos, based on the Quran, why in the past, within Muslim kingdoms, it was productive to recite other suras after Sura 1 in the standing position, and why today it is counterproductive to recite other suras in the standing position of the Contact Prayer. But this issue is for another video, where we deal with some conditional aspects of the Contact Prayer. In this video we are reconstructing only the obligatory aspects of the Contact Prayer from the Quran, and the obligatory part is only Sura 1, as recitation of the Quran in the standing position.
Now, the second group of speech obligations includes those which should be fulfilled fully or partially outside of the standing position, which means outside of Sura 1. Those obligations include glorifying our Lord, which does not happen in Sura 1, and magnifying God, which does not happen in Sura 1. Let’s go over them one by one and place them where they belong in the graph.
Glorification, “tasbih” in Arabic, like when we say “Subhan Allah” or “Subhana Rabbi”: the glorification of our Lord, according to the Quran, should be done early and after prostration. “Early” means that we should do it as early as possible, according to verse 23:61, but it cannot be done during the standing position, because we have to recite Sura 1 in that position, and if we say something else as well in that same position without waiting, it can make people think that it is part of the Quran recitation, and the Quran prohibits us from doing that. So after we recite the Quran, at any time, we should either pause for some time or change the position, so that people know that the recitation has ended and we are speaking with our own words from then on. Now, pausing would delay the prayer, which would be against 23:61, so the right thing to do is to glorify our Lord in the next closest position, which is the bowing position. So let’s put it there: glorify our Lord. And the other position where we are required to glorify our Lord is the prostration position. Let’s put it there: glorify our Lord, glorify our Lord.
So the conclusion is that we must glorify our Lord when we bow the first time, and during the two times when we prostrate. The Quran on purpose does not oblige us to use specific words to glorify God, because we can glorify Him in any language in limited circumstances, explained in another video. But the shortest way to fulfill the commandment in Arabic is to say “Subhana Rabbiyal Azim” during the first bowing, and “Subhana Rabbiyal A’la” during the prostration positions.
This is indicated by the fact that when Muhammad recited other suras from the Quran in the standing position right before bowing, once in a while he must have recited Sura 56 and Sura 69 as well, and the last order to glorify, which he said right before bowing, is the last verse of Sura 56 and the last verse of Sura 69, which both say, “Therefore, glorify the name of your Lord, the Great.” When the believers heard this, they executed it in Arabic by saying “Subhana Rabbiyal Azim.” Similarly, in the first verse of Sura 87, the believers are ordered to say “Subhana Rabbiyal A’la,” and this verse would have been recited soon after the prostration position of the previous unit, the previous rak’a.
Now let’s talk about the next speech obligation: magnification, “takbir” in Arabic, from the root word “kabbara,” like when they say “Allahu Akbar.” To say this is magnification of God. According to the Quran, magnification of God is a requirement to express appreciation for the guidance, and the guidance, according to the Quran, includes when we turn towards the Ka’ba and when we finish the recitation of the Quran. So we magnify God here and here. Also, magnification of God is a requirement whenever we complete a ritualistic step, so we magnify Him also after every step. So we must magnify Him also here, here, here, here and here: seven times in total.
However, one of them is a duplicate, because in the bowing position, when we said “Subhana Rabbiyal Azim,” “Azim” means the Greatest, or the Magnificent, so this technically fulfills the magnification obligation, allowing us to remove the second one, because we fulfilled the obligation already. So let’s remove that. Nevertheless, that leaves us with 1.23 seconds of free time to say something else there. It is not obligatory according to the Quran to say anything, but it is also not against the Quran to say a sentence, as long as it is not longer than 1.23 seconds, it is true, and it mentions God alone. If it fulfills these three conditions, you may say it, but it’s not obligatory. Traditionally, the majority of people since Muhammad have said, “God hears those who praise Him,” which is fine, but the traditional scholars agree that it is only a recommended saying, and if you don’t say it, it does not nullify your prayer. In this graph, we are only putting the obligatory parts.
Regarding the specific words which we need to use to magnify God, the Quran does not mention them, because we can do it in any language, depending on the circumstances explained in another video. But the shortest and most efficient way to fulfill this commandment in Arabic is to say “Allahu Akbar.”
Earlier, when we spoke about obligatory positions, we proved that we should do each obligatory position twice, so we can show that we did it intentionally. The same principle also applies to speech obligations; however, there are some nuances which we need to mention in this case. The first nuance is that when we do a body position, we cannot repeat it unless we exit it first, and when we exit it, we are already in another position. So the repetition of one body position affects the frequency and order of other body positions. But when it comes to speech obligations, we can repeat one sentence more than once without having to go through another sentence in between. This means that whether we do a speech obligation twice or even more than twice does not affect other things, but if we do a body position more than twice, it would affect other things. This is why, when we do speech obligations and body positions twice to show intentionality, we can actually do a speech obligation even more than twice and it would still be fine, but we wouldn’t want to repeat the same body position more than twice within the same Contact Prayer unit, so that we don’t mess up the order and frequency of other things. This is the first nuance.
The second nuance is that the three obligatory body positions are all short and simple, which makes it possible to do them unintentionally. Similarly, short and simple speech obligations are also possible to do unintentionally, but the longer, more intricate speech obligations cannot happen unintentionally. This is why God says that even if all the people of the world got together, they could not fabricate one sura like those of the Quran. It’s because they could not even get it right by chance, because each sura includes at least three sentences, three verses. So when we recite Sura 1 in our Contact Prayer, we do not need to repeat it twice, because it is more than three sentences long and could not possibly be said unintentionally. No one could say a sura unintentionally.
Also, when we magnify God, we do not need to repeat it twice or more in each position, because we do this obligation as a response to fulfilling the body positions, and we do each position twice, and therefore this obligation ends up being repeated six times anyway. So the only speech obligation which we need to repeat twice or more is the glorification of God. So now we know all the speech obligations of the Contact Prayer, how many times we should repeat each of them, and in what order we should say them. Two more obligations will arise as an exiting mechanism of the Contact Prayer, but we will address them later. For now, let’s first see the execution of these steps in practice.
[Demonstration of one unit of the Contact Prayer.]
So that is one Contact Prayer unit. It lasted exactly 45 seconds. Remember this fact; we will need it in the next section to calculate how many times we should repeat that unit of prayer during each time of the day.
So let’s find that out. Here we have a timeline representing the whole 24 hours of the day, starting with the beginning of dawn, which happens around 4:30 on average, until the beginning of the next dawn, at around 4:30. Now, to continue living long-term, you need about 8 hours of sleep per day: about 1 hour of siesta sleep at noon, which leaves us with about 7 hours of sleep at night. Let’s represent them with this red color.
In addition, the Quran mentions two basic meals: one in the forenoon and another one before sunset. Less than that would be unhealthy in the long term, and more than that is a privilege. When God wanted to provide the Children of Israel with basic food, enough to live, He gave them manna in the morning, something like bread, which could be collected and eaten in about half an hour, and quails in the afternoon, something like chicken, which needed to be cooked first and then eaten. Those were the only two daily meals for them for a long time. Of course, drinking water and milk were also available.
Bathroom time is also necessary: one long bathroom time in the morning, which includes cleanliness afterwards, adds up to about 30 minutes, while the few other one-minute bathroom breaks, all of them together, are less than five minutes; they are too small to be represented in this timeline. These are the basics which a person needs to be able to stay alive. All these necessities for living add up to exactly 10 hours, which leaves us with exactly 14 hours of awake, available time.
Now, please don’t presuppose, based on the Industrial Revolution dogma, that a person must work eight hours out of those 14 hours to survive. Studies have shown that, on average, an employee actually only works about 3 hours out of those eight hours, and the world still survives. So there is enough time available in this graph, in the forenoon, for worldly work and leisure.
But let’s focus on the available awake time which God designed to be spent on worshiping Him. That time is the time which falls in the periods where prayer times are prescribed, after we remove the times necessary for sleeping, eating and the bathroom, these times highlighted in red. According to the Quran, the five prayer times fall here, and you will see the Quranic proof of that later in this video. So the time which is available for us to engage in prayer is where these five prayer times intersect with the available free time: these green areas.
The first prayer time in this example is dawn, starting at 4:30 and ending at 6, which is 1 hour and 30 minutes long. But because the first 30 minutes are not available, having been taken by bathroom and cleanliness time, we are left with only one hour of available free time to do the prayer. Similarly, the noon time is three hours, but only two of them are available for prayer. The afternoon time is three hours, but only two of them are available for prayer. The sunset time is 1.5 hours, and all of it is available for prayer. The night time is nine hours, but in only two of them are you expected to be awake and available.
All these hours in green should be used fully for worshiping God in the Contact Prayer, not just a part of them: every second of them. This is because the Quran gives us unconditional obligations. For example, the Quran does not tell us to do the Contact Prayer during part of the noon. It says to engage in the Contact Prayer, period, no ifs and buts, which means continuously, whenever possible, and it is possible only in these green areas. In other words, when the Quran tells you to establish prayer, and let’s say you do five minutes of prayer and you stop, well, the Quran still tells you to do it. It’s a continuous commandment, at every possible moment. The Quran only excuses us to stop when we sleep, eat and use the bathroom, but other than that, we must spend the rest of the available prayer time, all of it, to establish prayer, because the commandments which construct the Contact Prayer are all unconditional, which makes them continuous.
This means that a perfect believer would spend exactly one hour constantly in prayer at dawn, two hours constantly in prayer at noon, two hours constantly in prayer in the afternoon, 1.5 hours constantly in prayer after sunset, and two hours constantly in prayer at night. This is what a perfect believer would do. This is what the Quran, which recommends that we be perfect believers, tells us to do. It’s an unconditional commandment, which makes it a permanent commandment whenever possible, and it’s possible in these green areas.
After all, this is why God created us. It shouldn’t surprise us at all to spend eight and a half hours a day worshiping God. The correct thing would have been to spend 24 hours worshiping God. That’s what angels do. That’s the correct thing to do, because God is infinitely awesome. No matter how much we worship Him, we always owe Him more. But He gives us an excuse, to allow us to sleep, eat and go to the bathroom, and therefore we should worship Him eight and a half hours a day, all these green areas together, and this would be the minimum to deserve Heaven. Anyone who doesn’t do that would go to Hell, because only people who are perfect believers will enter Heaven. Only people who get purified completely can enter Heaven.
This means that every single person on Earth deserves to go to Hell, since none of us spends all these green hours in prayer every single day. Knowing that we all deserve to go to Hell, God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, decided to save us not through justice, not through what we deserve, but through grace and mercy. Through His mercy, according to the Quran, whoever does a good deed gets rewarded 10 times for it, and whoever believes in the Quran gets double that, which makes it 20 times, and whoever believes in all of God’s messengers gets double that, which makes it 40 times. So because God is the Most Merciful, people who pray and believe in the Quran and believe in all the messengers get rewarded 40 times for their prayer.
This means that we can spend only 1/40th of this total time in prayer and still be rewarded as if we had prayed the whole available time. So with only 1/40th of the time which the Quran commands us to pray, God will reward us as if we had fulfilled all the prayer recommendations in the Quran. Let’s calculate how much 1/40th is for each of these five prayer times. One hour of prayer divided by 40 gives us exactly 90 seconds of prayer. Two hours of prayer divided by 40 gives us 180 seconds of prayer. Again, two hours of prayer divided by 40 gives us 180 seconds of prayer. 1.5 hours of prayer divided by 40 gives us 135 seconds of prayer. And finally, two hours of prayer divided by 40 gives us 180 seconds of prayer. So this is how much time we should spend in prayer to be able to fulfill the prayer qualifications, through God’s mercy, to go to Heaven.
Now, do you remember when we concluded earlier in this video that one full unit of prayer is exactly 45 seconds? So the question is: how many 45-second periods can we fit within these time periods? In other words, how many units of prayer can we fit within these time periods? We can fit two 45-second periods, or two units of prayer, within 90 seconds; four units of prayer within 180 seconds; another four units of prayer within the other 180 seconds; exactly three units of prayer within 135 seconds; and finally, four units of prayer within the last 180 seconds. So this is how many units of prayer we should do in each of the prayer times to be able to qualify for Heaven through God’s mercy: two units at dawn, four units at noon, four units in the afternoon, three units at sunset, and four units at night.
So these prayer units are basically just 1/40th, or 2.5%, of our free, available time, and as you know, the obligatory charity, Zakat, is also basically 2.5% of your available wealth. You can find the proof of that in our other video clarification, titled “Obligatory Charity (Zakat).” But we are mentioning it here because one way of thinking of the Contact Prayer is to think of it as the Zakat of the available time. So we have the Zakat, the purification, of the available time: the Contact Prayer; and the Zakat, the purification, of the available wealth: the obligatory charity. They are both 2.5% each. However, through His grace and mercy, God rewards them 40 times more and makes them 100%, which is the requirement to make it to Heaven.
So now, as promised, let’s prove from the Quran where we find the five prayer times. The prayer times are clarified and proven from the Quran in many of our other videos, so let’s just summarize them here. To be able to find the prayer times in the Quran, we first have to remember what we concluded earlier in this video: that all the unconditional obligations mentioned in the Quran must be part of the Contact Prayer. So when we search for Contact Prayer times in the Quran, we should also search for times of worship referring to other unconditional obligations, because they are automatically part of the Contact Prayer. When we do that, we find a total of 19 different verses which mention the times of unconditional obligations, automatically meaning times of Contact Prayers.
Here they are. On the left side, you can see all the 19 verses where those commandments are found, and the boxes represent the time period each commandment covers within this 24-hour timeline. We have to fulfill all these prayer time commandments, all these boxes. However, as we have learned by now, according to verse 23:61, if we can fulfill some of these commandments simultaneously, which means faster and more efficiently, we should do that, so that we can do more righteous deeds in a shorter time. So basically, whichever of these commandments, these boxes, we can do simultaneously, we must do that. The Quran tells us to choose the fastest path to compete in righteousness, and the fastest path we can take to complete all these prayer time commandments is to do five prayer times, represented by these arrows.
As you can see, with these five arrows we can hit all the boxes. If we used fewer than five arrows in this example, we wouldn’t be able to hit all the boxes, and according to verse 23:61 in Arabic, we should not do it with more than five if we can do it with a minimum of five. This means that with five prayer times you can fulfill all the prayer time commandments found in the Quran. It’s the most efficient way to fulfill all the prayer time commandments in typical cases. For cases where the day is longer than typical or shorter than typical, please refer to our other video clarification, titled “Times of Contact Prayer.” Here in this video, we are dealing only with the typical case, to keep it simple and help us understand the Contact Prayer more easily.
So now we know how to reconstruct the Contact Prayer from the Quran: the body positions and their order, the speech obligations and their order, the number of units, rak’as, in each time of the day, and the prayer times. Doing these together in their Quranic order makes the Contact Prayer.
However, as a result of doing the Contact Prayer, two other obligations always emerge: one, the Shahada, and two, the salams.
Do you remember how, towards the beginning of this video, you were presented with a list of the unconditional obligations mentioned in the Quran, and we concluded that performing all of them together formed the Contact Prayer? Among those obligations was also to mention God, “dhikr” in Arabic, and to worship God, “ibada” in Arabic. They are part of the Contact Prayer. However, what is different about dhikr and ibada is that, unlike the other unconditional obligations, which can be completely fulfilled within the Contact Prayer, these two unconditional obligations also go beyond the Contact Prayer. They are part of the Contact Prayer, but they also go beyond it.
The Quran, in verse 29:45 in the Arabic, says that dhikr, mentioning God, is bigger than the Contact Prayer. So even though we mention God during the Contact Prayer, we are still obliged to continue mentioning God beyond the Contact Prayer. Verse 4:103 tells us to mention God even after finishing the Contact Prayer. And the other unconditional obligation which goes beyond the Contact Prayer is worshiping God, ibada. As is well known, worshiping God also includes the Shahada, bearing witness, the Zakat, the fasting and the Hajj.
So now that we know that mentioning God and worshiping God go beyond the Contact Prayer, what would be the most efficient way to fulfill them beyond the Contact Prayer? We are obliged to do them in the most efficient, the fastest way, according to verse 23:61. The fastest way would be to find the shortest thing which fulfills both of them simultaneously. So what is that thing, besides the Contact Prayer, which is simultaneously the mentioning of God, dhikr, and the worshiping of God, ibada? Well, of the four additional worship rituals which we mentioned, only the Shahada is also dhikr. Zakat and fasting do not involve obligatory dhikr, and Hajj involves dhikr only in specific circumstances, places and times. But the Shahada is always dhikr and always ibada, always mentioning of God and always worship.
So the Shahada is the only other thing, besides the Contact Prayer, which is simultaneously dhikr and ibada, and because it is simultaneously both, it is the fastest way to fulfill both the dhikr and the ibada requirements. According to verse 23:61, we should choose the fastest way, which in this case is the Shahada. So to fulfill the obligatory requirements to both worship and mention God in the most efficient way after the Contact Prayer, we should say the Shahada at the earliest time after the Contact Prayer, which is right after the Contact Prayer.
Now, keep in mind that even though the Shahada is said after the Contact Prayer, in practice it is connected to the Contact Prayer like the head is connected to the body. They do not exist without one another. If you remove one of them, the other one dies as well. The Quran says that all your Contact Prayers will go to waste, they will be considered zero, as if you never did them, if you do not express the correct Shahada in words and in actions. Also, your Shahada does not mean anything if you do not do the Contact Prayer. The Quran says that the believers do not speak empty words; God hates it so much when people say what they do not do. You cannot say that there is no other god besides God worthy of being worshiped, and then not even do the minimum of worshiping God, which is the Contact Prayer.
So for all those who are healthy in body and in mind today, the Shahada is not accepted without the Contact Prayer, and the Contact Prayer is not accepted without the Shahada, just like the head cannot exist without the body and the body cannot exist without the head. And just like the head is the culmination of your body, the Shahada is also the culmination of the Contact Prayer, the end of the Contact Prayer. By the way, the correct Shahada, according to verse 3:18 in the Quran, is only: “There is no other god except God,” or “I bear witness that there is no other god except God.” That’s it. That’s the Shahada.
The Shahada is so important to show that the Contact Prayer was dedicated to God alone, so much so that we should even avoid any implicit possibility or misunderstanding that it could be otherwise. One such case, where there is potential for the misunderstanding that maybe the Contact Prayer was dedicated to more than one god, is when you do one Contact Prayer unit and then you repeat exactly the same thing twice. If both units are completely the same, then, if the first one was dedicated to God, why did we need to do the second one? Was it potentially dedicated to another god? So to avoid even this misunderstanding, we should recite the Shahada, to state that there is no other god except God, every two units of the Contact Prayer. In this way, we give the devil no excuse whatsoever to claim that our Contact Prayer was dedicated to another god.
By the way, the Shahada which we recite within the Contact Prayer is part of the Contact Prayer, like the heart is part of the body, but the final Shahada is only connected to the Contact Prayer, like the head is connected to the body. Because the final Shahada is not technically part of the Contact Prayer, you are allowed to repeat the Shahada more than once, in different ways, as long as it has the same meaning, and it will not change the prayer. You can also choose to say “God is one,” or “God has no partners,” and similar statements with the same meaning, or just repeat “There is no other god except God” as many times as you want. But this is applicable only when you pray alone and you know that no one is waiting for you. When you lead a group, you are not allowed to go beyond the minimum without the consensus of all the other believers, unless you are their king, deciding on their behalf, which you are not.
So now we have learned how the Shahada is connected to the Contact Prayer. Now let’s talk about the salams. According to the Quran, the angels are believers in God’s revelations. In verse 6:54, the Quran tells us that when those who believe in God’s revelations, which includes the angels, come to you, you should say, “Salamun alaykum,” peace be upon you. And according to verse 41:30, angels do come to us when we declare that God is our Lord and then stand up straight. We do this when we stand up straight from the bowing position in the Contact Prayer, having just said “Subhana Rabbiyal Azim,” glory be to my Lord, the Greatest. The Greatest is God. So since we fulfill the rule in verse 41:30 when we do the Contact Prayer, the angels, who are believers, descend upon us, and we have to say “Salamun alaykum,” peace be upon you, to them.
Now, since the angels are more righteous than us and never disobey God’s commands, when they came to us during the Contact Prayer they already said “Salamun alaykum” to us. However, we are not allowed to interrupt the Contact Prayer and respond to them immediately; contact with God has priority. Therefore, we respond to them at the earliest possible time, which is when we finish the Contact Prayer, and we respond to them with “Assalamu alaykum,” turning our head to the right, and the same to the left. The reason for this is that the Quran tells us, in verse 50:17, that the angels sit on our right and on our left to record our deeds.
In the group prayer, the additional reason for saying “Assalamu alaykum” to the right and to the left is this: at the end of the prayer, the prayer leader has evidence that those who did the prayer with him, when they heard the recitation of Sura 1, bowed and prostrated according to the Quran. This is evidence that they believed in the Quran which the prayer leader recited. And verse 6:54 says that when those who believe in God’s revelations come to you, which happened when they followed him in prayer, he should say “Salamun alaykum.” So when he’s saying “Assalamu alaykum” to the angels, he’s also saying “Assalamu alaykum” to the followers. Now, when the followers hear it, verse 4:86 obliges them to respond with an equal greeting or a better one. An equal greeting would be to also say “Assalamu alaykum,” and a better one would, for example, be to say “Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah,” which is also fine. But in this video we are focusing on the obligatory parts only. Simply saying “Assalamu alaykum” when the leader says “Assalamu alaykum” fulfills the obligatory part.
Some people say that we shouldn’t say these salams, because the purpose of the Contact Prayer is to talk to God, and not to talk to angels and to other believers. That’s true, but as we said earlier, the Contact Prayer ended before the salams, so the salams are not part of the Contact Prayer. Similarly, the clothes which we wear on our bodies are not part of our bodies, but they follow our bodies wherever our bodies go. The salams follow the Contact Prayer at the end, at whichever time the Contact Prayer happens. They are not part of it, but they follow it.
So finally, after 14 centuries, we have managed to find all the details of the Contact Prayer from the Quran, and also the Shahada and the salams. Now let us see in practice how to perform them. You will see an example of the dawn prayer, which has two units of prayer; then an example of the noon, afternoon and night prayers, because they are the same, each of them having four units of prayer; and then finally, you will see an example of the sunset, or evening, prayer, which has three units of prayer. Here we go.
[Demonstration of the dawn prayer (two units), the noon, afternoon and night prayers (four units each), and the sunset prayer (three units).]