Why five prayers? 5 answers on what the Quran says and what it leaves to the Prophet

It tells believers to establish prayer at the two ends of the day and in the early hours of the night.^[1] It points to prayer from the sun’s decline to the darkness of night, and the recitation at dawn.^[2] It speaks of glorifying God before sunrise and before sunset, and in the hours of the night.^[3]

Another passage calls for glorifying God in the evening, in the morning, in the afternoon and at noon, and elsewhere the Quran says that prayer is prescribed for believers at fixed times.^[4] Dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset and night can all be read out of these scattered verses, and the classical jurists drew the five from them together with the practice they had seen.

The times are there. The count and the form come from somewhere else, and the Quran says where.

It tells believers to obey God and obey the Messenger,^[5] and to take what the Messenger gives and refrain from what he forbids.^[6] It describes him as the one who explains to people what was sent down to them.^[7] It calls his conduct a good example for those who hope in God and the Last Day.^[8]

A book that tells you to follow a teacher for the detail has told you where the detail lives.

The Quran treats other duties the same way. It commands zakah, the annual giving, many times without stating the rates, and the pilgrimage (hajj) without setting out its rites. Nobody has been able to follow those commands without the Prophet’s teaching. The jurists, al-Shafii among them, argued from these verses that the Prophet’s explanation is part of how the Quran is meant to be read.

Ismail al Faruqi puts the relation in a single phrase: the Prophet’s practice (sunnah, “trodden path”) supplies “the exemplary ‘how’ for the ‘what’ of revelation”, and from it Muslims take the whole form of their worship.^[9]

When the Quran calls itself a detailed explanation of all things, the classical reading is that it sets out everything needed for guidance, directly or by pointing to its source.^[10] It never claims to be a liturgical rubric. The critic’s reading makes “detailed” mean something no Muslim scholar ever took it to mean.

The strongest form of the objection quotes a second verse: God has neglected nothing in the Book.^[11] Commentators differ on whether “the Book” there means the Quran or God’s whole record of creation. On the first reading the verse still includes the command to obey the Messenger, which is how the detail of prayer reaches the reader. A modern movement that holds to the Quran alone does exist. It has to explain away the verses of the previous entry and the unbroken practice described in the next.

The five daily prayers are among the most widely transmitted practices in Islam, performed publicly, in congregation, five times a day, from the first generation to now. No early Muslim community prayed three, and none prayed seven.

A practice performed billions of times, in every Muslim city, since the 7th century, is known the way public practice is always known: people watched it, and joined in.

The hadith (reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds) record how it began. In a well-known report a man from the desert asked what God had made obligatory on him in prayer, and the Prophet answered with the five prayers of the day and night.^[12] Other reports describe Gabriel leading the Prophet through the times of prayer,^[13] and the night journey, after which fifty prayers were reduced to five.^[14] A sceptic may question any single report. The practice does not rest on a single report.

Ask a Christian to prove the Trinity, infant baptism or Sunday worship from the text alone, with no church tradition. Every Christian community relies on received practice to read its scripture.

The New Testament does describe the first Christians meeting on the first day of the week,^[15] but it gives no command to hold the Sabbath on Sunday. Christians who hold that scripture alone is the final authority still rely on early creeds to state the Trinity, and on the church’s decisions in the early centuries to fix the list of books that make up the New Testament. The point is not that these practices lack defenders. Each is defended from tradition as well as text.

That is how revealed religion has always worked in both faiths: a text, and the people who lived it.