Salah (Prayer) - Hamza Yusuf

so the first the second pillar which is prayer is trying to connect people to God to put people into a state in which they are connected now how is that done it's done by obligating prayer prayer is not choice in Islam there are prayers you can do out of choice but there are prayers that you have to submit to so again the idea of submission comes into the idea of praying I submit to five prayers a day that is something that I submit to that's a rule I'm being told pray five times a day and I can either say no I don't want to pray or I'm going to pray I recognize this an obligation binding on me and that's belief in Islam now there are many Muslims that don't pray anyway which is another matter and again it's like anybody who doesn't follow their tradition they still might believe in it they're just not practicing it now the prayer there are five prayers in a day and this is based on that equitorial day all right here's sunset and here's sundown here's your meridian point here's your midnight point so this is day this is night now the first prayer begins at dawn for people normally if you ask you know what's the first prayer most people will say dawn prayer in reality the first prayer according to the Muslims is the sunset prayer this is also people who know the Jewish tradition are familiar with the fact that the day begins at sunset right this is the same in the Islamic tradition the day begins at sunset because it's based on a lunar month the month begins at the sighting of the lunar moon for the Muslims and the lunar month begins with sunset that's the first time that the moon is visible when it's new now this this prayer lasts it's got a short window until the red is gone out of the sky that's the time for Mulder so Muslims are supposed to pray it very quickly now it's interesting that the Quran says in many places that the two ends of the day are the times when people should remember God particularly these two ends the dawn and the sunset and I think something that many people notice and the Muslims take it as you know this is one of these aspects that they take from the put on of everything being in praise that oftentimes animals gather at those period you'll see birds gather at sunset and they'll gather at the early part before the sunrise and chirp away they literally gather and congregate during that time and chirp away the crickets in the evening start the the frogs that these are all seen as literally praises that's the way the Muslims view it now I'm sure you know evolutionary biologists would say the crickets cooling himself off you know and but it's interesting I mean why things in creation do these things gather and do these things the Muslims view it as really acts of praise the next prayer goes from when these the red is gone and this is called mother to prayer or or the sunset prayer the next prayer is when the Sun all the red is gone and this goes basically until midnight one should do it and really for the first third of the night if you divide the night into three parts between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. it should be done in that first third of the night after the redness is gone that's the best time and then after that you're delaying it and the prayers are not encouraged to be delayed and it's prohibited to delay them and till they actually go out of the time altogether so that is the next prayer and then this period is all encouraged for people who want to do X prepares the night time in particular is encouraged many Muslims do night prayers many do not but there are many Muslims that do do night prayer some portion of the night I mean my teacher I think minimum was maybe 3 hours that was his practice to stand in prayer and you know the the man who's here that's his practice because I've lived with him for over a year in different places and that's his practice so many Muslims won't make it a practice to pray at night it's a good time at the time meditation it's a time of tranquility and stillness and also there's a there's a nice Hasidic tale of why the prayer is a special time in in this Hasidic tale I think Boober talks about it that that the seeker of God is like a thief trying to steal something precious and the thief always works at night the the next prayer is dawn prayer and that begins at the first light now there's an interesting phenomenon called the false dawn which is a white light that will show up towards the middle of the eastern horizon and then it disappears and then after that the second dawn comes up the second dawn is the dawn that the Muslims are begin their prayer and that will go until right before sunset all of that is time that you can pray the preferred time is that the first time but any time before that you can pray so technically we could pray anyway from 4:30 till about is it time to break ok sunrise yeah Sun right until the Sun rises and so we could technically be here pray any time from 4:30 to about probably quarter to 6:00 or 5:30 whenever the Sun rises it would be perfectly acceptable and that's if you if you overslept there's nothing there's no responsibility the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said the sleeper has no responsibility the madman has no responsibility and the child has no responsibility until they reach puberty so the sleeper has no responsibility but there there is an idea that if you went to sleep not intending to get up for for the prayer then you are responsible the you that you should intend to get up for the prayer that if you just say you know I set your alarm for 8:00 then that that would be considered something wrong that you've done something wrong and then the Sun comes up now you will notice a phenomenon because all of the prayers are based on the Sun this the night prayer when this all the red is gone from the Sun the dawn prayer when the first light of the Sun comes and then the next prayer what you'll notice as the Sun is moving up in the sky and I think this will be a really interesting exercise to give to some of your students if you're interested in doing this because it will teach them some very interesting things one of the interesting and fascinating things about human being is that astronomy is really where we get our mathematics from early man became very fascinated with the sky and began to examine and watch the sky and watch movements of the stars and began to discern certain patterns right and over centuries an accumulation of knowledge occurs right I mean this is what richard fineman mentioned that the people who are familiar with him six Easy Pieces and he was a Nobel Prize winning physicist from Cal Poly and got his Nobel Prize in quantum electrodynamics whatever that means but he he said that for the fifth that the physicists and I and the astronomers is true in others he said really what we're like is is you know people that are watching the gods on Mount Olympus play chess and they don't let you in on the rules so what you do is you know you have what 4050 years of thinking in your lifetime you start watching the game you notice oh the Bishop only moves that way and the pawn moves this way and the Queen moves this way and you start discerning rules and he said and we begin to write those down right so we're discerning that there's patterns here but we really haven't been given a whole lot of information and one of the things he says is that the problem with this is that everyone said well something like castling comes up and you have to start all over again what was that you know so what happened is people became for some reason obsessed with the meridian point determining when the Sun reached that meridian point now in the Quran it says that we gave you the Sun and the stars one of the reasons the Sun according to the Quran was given to human beings was to allow you to measure your years and learn mathematics I mean that's literally in the Quran that one of the wisdoms behind that is to learn mathematics now just I mean this is like they'll probably it may be lit up said you start bringing geometry into a world history class or something like that right but the idea here is that what what will happen how the prayer is determined is you put a stick here or you use your body and if anybody's interested in learning is I can teach them alright because I really this fascinatin at Muslim camps they're fascinated by it they really they really enjoy it and it's a lot of fun what what you'll notice is towards the western horizon a shadow shows up that's very long from the early Sun and this shadow will continue to decrease as the sun's moving up until it reaches its shortest point here and this is the ninety degree angle if you're looking at the one hundred and eighty circumference right 0 to 180 the 90 degree angle now if you're in an equatorial place on the earth which is a very small narrow place where the Sun will actually be directly overhead twice a year like Mecca the shadow will disappear completely Sun is literally directly over your head and the shadow disappears for us you'll notice in the winter the shadows long in the summer it's short based on the movement in the winter towards the south of the Sun shifting the earth I mean I prefer to look at it geocentric ly just because that's phenomenal logical or experientially we experience it geocentric ly so I'm gonna I'm going to speak in geocentric terms all right so I'm not trying to you know get out of abstract thinking but I'm just trying to look at this as a huy experience that as human beings that instead of looking as the shift of the earth I'd rather look at as the Sun is moving over because that's how we see it and that's how young people experience it the when the Sun moves over to the South then the shadow becomes longer in the winter now as the sun's moving back towards the north then the shadow is getting smaller and smaller so you can actually see the movement of the shadow during the year it's a very interesting thing and I've been doing it for a while so I'm very now accustomed to knowing I mean I can pretty much work out what time of the day it is just on my shadow if the sun's out because I know the shadow pretty well in the winter in the summer and if you live with Bedouins who know the Sun really well it's phenomenal how accurate they can tell you the time based on just looking at the shadow now there's an interesting verse in the Quran that I find really fascinating because when I first read this and I first began examining shadows I you know I start thinking about and want to look in the product there's a verse that said Adam Terra yada be cocky omit that book haven't you looked at your Lord how your Lord moves the shadow now this gets back to a Tahiti idea or idea that the Sun is a means but in reality it is God that is creating this phenomenon for us and then it says what Oh Shia but a book at a job who second and had your Lord wanted he would have made the shadow stationary right so we could imagine a world in which the Sun is directly overhead be pretty hot to live in but the shadow wouldn't really move right it would be stationary but we do experience a movement of the shadow and then it says rajesh mca he did ela and we made the son as a approver or an indicator of shadow now the interesting thing in arabic the word for shade and shadow which are related in in english are from the same they're the same word identical word when i first read that verse i was really struck you know what does that mean we made this the sun an indicator of shade or the shadow so I went to a commentary by far Dino Rossi who's a ninth century Persian commentary of the Quran and he just gave this really interesting explanation of that saying that what the Quran here is doing is it's indicating that that one of the greatest blessings of God that most human beings are completely unaware of is shade now this is obviously more obvious in in a hot country I admit that but if you start thinking about it it actually gets quite profound because what he said is what shade is is a mixture of light and darkness and the only reason we can see is because of this admixture of light and darkness if we were in pure light we could not see and if we were in pure darkness we not see so shade in fact is everywhere and it's happening all the time right now there's a mixture of light and darkness in this room which is enabling us to see and what the quran is saying had it not been for the Sun you wouldn't even thought about the shade it's not something that you would given a whole lot of thought to so there's an idea of learning about the shade and seeing is literally a proof of the existence of God that's how Rossi uses it and the other thing about shade which is interesting is that the paradise is described as shade spread out to shade spread out so what will happen is in a northernly climate in the summer the shadow will reach at shortest point and what you can do is get the students like to put a stick up with it with a piece of paper and they can measure it with a ruler so they can watch the shadow going closer and closer until it reaches the shortest point and then they'll see it start increasing again the at the point when it reaches the shortest point that is the meridian point so they can actually learn to determine for themselves the meridian point which is the 90-degree angle now at the point which the Sun moves one one altitude '''l degree away from the center of the earth from the center of the sky which is here that is the beginning of the the whole prayer and the sign of it is the shadow begins to increase towards the east now that is the first prayer that was given to the Prophet Muhammad and the idea there is according to the commentators is the interesting thing about the beginning of the see what's happening is the Sun is rising it reaches the mid point of the sky and then it begins its decline and the idea is is that that is an indication for the human being that just as we are like the Sun we rise up we reach our full strength and power and then we begin to decline and sunset is cosmologically seen as death the idea that death is imminent that death is coming and so the shade itself is seen as an indication of our own lives that just as as as it as we rise in in the east we will also set in the West and so that the day itself has been traditionally by the Muslims described cosmologically they say that the the mid morning is like spring it's like the child coming into existence and spring is a fun time it's it's a time you know generally whether it's the the you know it's it's a time of renewal and and it's a time of innocence right and traditionally you know there's a lot of just folkloric things about people falling in love and spring and doing the same because it's an innocent time that's how we associate it folkloric ly and then summer is seen as when youth coming into youth right and it's it's a time of work it's a time of harvest youth is when you have a lot of energy to to begin to harvest your crops so it's a time of study it's a time of dedication it's a time of exerting a lot of effort and then the fall is seen as the moving now into maturity and this is the time when you benefit from the fruits of your youth that you harvested that your mind begins to mature in a way that you you now become conscious and you begin to use the wisdom of your youth in ways and this is interesting I think Erikson's models is interesting that he talks about this period being productivity versus stagnation right that people begin to think beyond themselves as they reach into this mature period of around 40 and interestingly that the Muslim world view does Demark the year 40 as this year where we're perception begins to change where one begins to get outside of one's egotistical youth and begins to really look beyond one's personal welfare and benefit and really looks how can my life be meaningful and ultimately meaning in life arises out of service out of going beyond the self out of looking at what is what is my contribution going to be to my society to my family to my culture to my tradition and this is this period of the fall and it's a beautiful period because it's a maturing and it's when there's variation in color right you're getting a the the changing of leaves and all these things a very interesting time fall and then winter which is moving into that last period of life the dryness the the leaves fall right the body begins to wear and and we enter into that last period of our lives and then death and then according to the Muslims rebirth in the next world right which would be the renewal and spring is the sign of that so you can see how in the prayer there is this cosmology embedded here I think we'll take a break now all right is that good and then what we'll do is we'll come back and I'll open up for some questions about the first section and then start on the second section okay if you look on the verse 41 just about the prayer I think that's really interesting it's on page 10 20 it says see is thou not that it is Allah who praises all beings whose praise whose praises all beings in the heavens I have problem with these kind of translations it I'm just going to do my own here haven't you seen that it is Allah that all beings are praising from the birds in the heavens and the earth what by oral soffit and even the birds in flying and everything knows it's prayer hada anima salah Tahoe Kunlun edema Salah Tahoe what does we aho every creature knows his prayer and his praise this is really interesting and the idea that every creature is in an act of worship and it knows how to do that the bird knows how it's supposed to praise right and so for the Muslims when they look at creatures they really see that these creatures are all glorifying God and have a prayer that they're doing so you know the praying mantis has it's prayer the cat has its prayer I mean you can see the cat in a state of meditation you know when it's there just purring away and doing I mean it goes into a really interesting state and in fact Zen Buddhists you know traditionally talk about the cat and it's meditative state is you know that you can learn Zen from a cat if you want to learn how to do size in you watch a cat and then that that the human being is somebody who does does does not by Nature know his prayer that the prayer is something that is taught and this relates because the human being is a creature that has intellect that has consciousness that it is not inspired or there's not an intuitive although many people will feel some type of desire to pray and will pray and many people even outside of traditions in this culture at some time in their life will attempt to pray for the Muslim point of view you know there is a way of praying and that way involves the body and there's an importance of the idea of being in the body when one prays because the Muslims have always really avoided a type of Cartesian dualism of mind body and we believe in the bodily resurrection although we do see that the soul is is connected to body and the soul does disengage from the body and in fact the Muslims believe according to the Padang that the soul even disengages during sleep that there is a disengagement that takes place but there is an idea that the body is also part you know that we should not deny our bodies in fact the body is part of our being and does represent a very important aspect of our nature and so the prayer is a physical prayer as well as being a spiritual prayer that the body itself is being used as an act of worship and so there is a standing and then there's a bowing and then a return and then a prostration and each of the limbs is participating in that effective seven limbs Hakeem talked about that the seven limbs and then there is an idea of putting the forehead right and the nose onto the ground literally onto the ground and the act of this there's a symbolic act which is elevating the heart over the intellect that there is an idea that that in the act of worship that we are submitting the intellect and we are elevating the heart because the heart according to the Muslims is the organ of cognition and what it is what what it was created to do was to come to know God it was to come to know God so that this is just I mean this is something some of the scholars have mentioned it's not really it's just a symbolic type of and then the prayer that I didn't mention here was the afternoon prayer at the point that the Sun reaches a point where the shadow will cast the like of a thing plus whatever the shadow at the meridian point was so most people if you measure your your height to your feet the vast majority of people what they called it you know two standard deviations right 95% of people are going to come between six and a half to seven feet of their height if you have normal foot size to your height so if you if you literally lie down and put a quarter at the tip of your head and something at your feet and then you go you see and measure it and you go one two three you'll find that your height will generally be about seven feet and so for the Muslim of the traditional Muslims measure the Sun with their body which is again using body as an act of worship because measuring the Sun shadow is considered an act of worship it's part of remembrance of God and so you would go out if you knew for instance like right now from for me the Meridian that the whole prayer is my my shadow is about two feet so I would add to that seven so when my shadow reaches nine feet also time has come in this prayer so I go out at about five o'clock and I measure it and I'll find it's nine feet that means I can pray awesome right so that's the that that is the afternoon prayer so those are the five prayers the sunset the evening prayer which is called Asia the dawn prayer which is called fejoe which literally means dawn and then the post-meridian prayer which is called the whole so those are the prayers that's the first pillar what you will do or the second pillar not including the Shahada what you will do is you will five times a day stop everything in Muslim countries traditionally people left their shops I mean this is less so now because Muslims are being secularized like everybody else but traditionally and you can still find this in some countries Muslims will leave their shops oftentimes they didn't lock them they would literally put drapes because for somebody to steal while somebody was praying even a thief had a sense of honour there right that that was not a good thing to do and it's interesting that traditionally many many court cases were decided based on what's called a oath where the judge would say do you swear by God that you're telling the truth or lying many many historically many court cases were solved because people were quite literally afraid of bearing false witness or or lying and that's and they would say I can't say that and that would literally end the trial many many cases like that historically so traditionally people did have a sense you know that there were certain things even the thief had there's a famous story of imam al-ghazali great theologian and scholar who studied in he's from those in persia and he'd studied in one of the great Persian cities and he had spent two years transcribing all these books by hand because this people you know they weren't printing presses you wanted books you had to write Matt he went to the library spent two years doing that and on the way back a they were their Caravan was attacked by brigands and they were taking his books and out of Azad East begged this chief of the thieves don't you can't take all my knowledge and he and the thief laughed and he said what kind of knowledge do you have when somebody like me can steal it and Elka's adi said that he realized that god had made him say that to tell to let him know and to remind him that true knowledge was not in books right what's that yeah that's it what's that the fifth prayer let's say you would have mulleted Ayesha Fez you're the and NASA is the last prayer also and that means the afternoon prayer now just to let you know what the Muslims are encouraged to congregate for the prayer but they don't have to it's very highly encouraged to congregate women can can go to the mosque and Congress if they like or if they don't that it's it's not encouraged for them the house is actually where the women generally pray in most Muslim cultures and I will just make mention of certain phenomena that you relate traditionally there was no barrier between the men and the women praying that is a later innovation it was not the tradition of the Prophet prophet did not have a barrier between the men and the women that came later in many Muslim countries you still do not have that barrier for instance African countries North Africa you do not have that barrier in the Middle East in the indo-pak cultures you will tend to find barriers so that is more of a cultural phenomenon it is not a religious is not part of the religious tradition even this what they call the machado bia in the mosque here which is this a latticed woodwork between the men and the women that is not traditional that is well as traditional in terms of muslim culture but it is not from the religion the religion does not say that that is something that people introduced as a cultural phenomenon so and that's important to remember and there are some countries that you know I think a few were where there's an extreme patriarchy there and you know women it's really hard for them to pray in the mosque and that again is a cultural phenomenon because the Prophet prohibited that he said do not prohibit women from going to the mosques and it's a sound hadith I think probably on the Arabian Peninsula you will find in some of the mosque in the villages in Mecca and Medina definitely not there are women praying there Mecca you'll look here the black are generally the women in the pictures if you see of Mecca the Kaaba when you see big black groupings those are generally the women and the white are the men right because in that country they tend to wear black and white the men wear white the women wear black in Algeria the women wear white so that again is a cultural thing of color in West Africa whereas dr. yang is from women very they're like cockatoos you know they're very very colorful a lot of color in their their hijab and Morocco the it's pretty much almost like a basic kind of unisex type they wear a djellaba and the differences would be in the colours but the actual djellaba is very similar that women wear the same dress as the men do except the colors distinguish so huh do this gender separation do they think of it and explain it as being Islam I think I think mostly they do that I think most of them do you know and you get you know I mean patriarchy is a phenomenon worldwide and and whereas we are as susceptible to it as any other culture I think there's been a lot of artificial mechanisms that trying to break it down but nonetheless that you know there's still a lot of remnants I'll give you some examples in in Muslim law and real clay is going to talk about this but in Muslim law a woman does not have to serve her husband in her house and she cannot be forced to if she refuses to cook the man has to provide somebody who will cook or he has to cook himself she is highly encouraged to do that but it is literally within the Islamic law that she has a right to say I don't want to cook right it's in it's based on the Hadees and based on the scholars interpretation but this is literally 1400 years ago when this was these judgments were being pronounced you know that women the money is theirs if a woman earns money she can actually go to a pot if the husband takes the money from her she has a right to go to a poly and because it's a crime it's not his money any money that comes into hers is hers whereas the money the man earns a portion of it has to go to the woman bye-bye-bye law so there it's very interesting you know I think that you know the phenomenon of the abuse of certain characteristics that the man certainly physical which is changing in this country but generally in most societies men tend to be physically stronger and have been able to coerce women physically to do things and there's a very interesting verse in the Quran which is about ASEA the wife of faroan pharaoh when she says oh god saved me from my husband the tyrant and I just find that's really fascinating that that's a dua you know so it's a it's a prayer in the Quran from a woman about her husband who's a tyrant being has to be save him and I just wonder historically you know how many women that that has been a type of you know sustenance for that type you know in this culture as well I mean we have we still have very serious problems with domestic violence we've and we tend to really look at the the public space and not so much we forget about the private space about a you know a lot of mental cruelty a lot it's all still going on but there's a type of openness that is emerged in the culture where these things you know people can talk about them Mauritania where share hub Dulles from you know we are talking about this about domestic violence and things like that and it's interesting that in Mauritania it's impossible for a man to hit a woman it's literally impossible one because of tribe in other words marital relationships are very you know they're very related to the family and so for for there to be any injustice towards the woman it's going to affect very heavily on relationships in her family relationships and things like that and the women generally tend to be very educated from his group particularly and know their rights and they're quite their strong women there's an also no polygamy in that cut sure at all because the women put a condition in their marriage contracts on the one a second wife and they know that's a right that they have right they can stipulate that in a contract and they do that that's it absolutely it's from again it's it's from the scholars understanding and interpretation that and that there are early community instances where that was from the companions where that was established

Channel: Islam On Demand

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Keywords: islam, prayer, call to prayer, learn how to pray in islam, islam religion, islamic prayers, islamic prayer, muslim, prayers, the prayer, muslim prayer, islamic, salah, salat, five pillars of islam, 5 pillars of islam, pillars of islam, five pillars of islam explained, 5 pillar of islam, the 5 pillars of islam, 5 pillars, five pillar of islam, the five pillars of islam, basics of islam, shaykh hamza yusuf, hamza yousuf, hamza yusuf (author), hamza yousif, mark hanson, pillars

Id: XxCGVGzbdP8

Length: 36min 35sec (2195 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2011