Belief
R. Allan

A sincere desire to communicate

  I have been giving thought to prayer times recently and so decided to see what Quran said. In reading Quran for this purpose I tried hard to put out of my mind any preconceived notion of a set number of prayer times and in order to get the best out of my efforts I have compared three translations, namely Yusuf Ali, N.J. Dawood and Khalifa.

Looking at the appropriate suras it would seem that the quantity but the quality that counts. Not how many times we pray, nor how many rakats we say, but our sincerity and intention. This is, I think what God teaches us about prayer: that when we pray to Him, we must do so not out of mere habit, not repeating words in a foreign language that we do not fully comprehend and have only learned by rote, but as a result of our sincere desire to communicate with Him.

After all, there are so many times when man prays, particularly in distressed conditions, without waiting for any particular time of day. Does not God see and hear everything all the time? Will He not answer one of His servants just because the servant does not pray at the `right' time or in a particular language or dressed in certain clothes?

To spread such ideas is shirk, just as trying to make people pray a certain number of times at certain times of the day is against the teaching of God. God in His mercy has identified for us certain times when it would be easiest and most convenient for us to pray to Him. These times are neither exhaustive nor exclusive, and in a universe where the Creator is aware of even an atom's weight, or the call of the lowliest of His servants in distress, nor can they be.