Friday Prayer: One Happy Day

It’s Friday! The weekly Friday prayer is taking place in all the mosques around the house. Living in Cairo, in Egypt, gives me the privilege of listening to the Azan and to the Khutba. So I thought why not write something about that. Friday prayer is after all quite the event even though not everyone notices I guess. I was planning for my next topic (which I have been planning for for a couple of weeks trying to get it quite right) to be about praying from the heart, but I think the Friday prayer is worth it.

I am a girl so I don’t necessarily need to go pray the Friday prayer in the mosque. Men – and boys – are required to though. So I wake up on a Friday morning. It’s the first day of the weekend which already gives this nice feeling of relaxation. It’s gonna be a good day in sha’ Allah. The entire family is home. We have breakfast together in no rush, talk about this and that. The Azan for Friday prayer starts and off goes my brother to the mosque, as my dad used to (God rest his soul). I stay at home, the weather is nice, the window is open, not so many cars on the streets but they start to pile up near the mosques. The Imam starts the Khutba and I can hear it right here in my home. At the mosque, my brother among other people starts praying. The Friday prayer consists of the khutba which is a speech about anything socio-religious; about certain situations in the life of the Prophet PBUH, about religious events, or even about how we should be polite in dealing with other people. I heard a speech about anger management once which I liked a lot. So you listen and look at the ceiling of the mosque and feel the presence of God more abundantly all around you and all inside you. There is Duaa sometimes within it (please God grant me peace). The speech is peaceful, educational, religious, spiritual, thought provoking (hopefully), and there is this feeling of spiritual energy recharged, just like a battery. Will it charge you enough for the entire week? For the day? For a couple of hours to come? Will it inspire you to do some good, or maybe learn more about your religion? Depends on you and maybe on the speech and the Imam too.

The khutba may be 15 minutes, half an hour, maybe an hour, maybe two! There was this situation I remember from the times of early Islam when the Imam (I think it was was Uthman Ibn Affan but I couldn’t find the reference right now, so please anyone correct me if I’m wrong) and he forgot the speech he was planning to say, so he ended up saying only one statement! The speech could be THAT SHORT!

After the speech, there are two raka’as. The noon prayer, which is substituted by the Friday prayer on Friday, is four raka’as not two. But the speech is in the place of the two that were removed from this prayer. This means that we are required to listen to some person who probably knows more about religion for some time on Friday. We are required to recharge our spiritual batteries even if it’s just for a couple of minutes because the act of praying itself may not be enough because maybe it’s not completely from the heart and maybe I was in a hurry because I had a meeting when I prayed, and maybe there was too much noise so I couldn’t concentrate. But here you are in a mosque, listening to the Imam talking about religious matters, thinking consciously about our faith, and then adding to it a normal prayer to make it complete.

The really beautiful thing about Friday prayer is the post prayer rituals. Not exactly rituals of course, but there are just so many people so you will end up smiling at people you don’t know, maybe helping an old man with something, seeing friends and neighbors, talking about anything or nothing. It’s a very friendly environment, and by the time you get home it’s hard not to think about spending the rest of the day with important people. So why not go visit family? Wouldn’t that be the perfect day!

To sum up, on Friday if a person gets to go to Friday prayer, they will listen to something important and nice for sometime about religion and society, get the spiritual battery recharged, continue the prayer from the heart as a result, meet people, smile at people, get smiled at by people, and consider spending the day with the people that matter in the family, because family always matters. No wonder it’s considered a feast in the heavens: One Fine Day :)

A small confession

I have to admit, writing religious content has proven to be quite the challenge for me; mainly because I am not a scholar, I don’t attend lessons or read a lot of religious books as I try to strengthen my faith first by those tools which were instinctively given to us as human beings: prayer (salah), prayer (doaa), fasting, paying zakah, and most importantly, lots and lots of thinking. And also, because I believe that religion is a matter of having the heart and mind aligned so that when I perform my dues, I perform them with conviction and spirit.

When I wrote 7ay 3ala el salah, I got a mix of good and bad comments. The good comments were because it was from the heart and to the heart; I did not claim to be a scholar or even to be well read in religion, but I said what I feel about it and a lot of people related to it. The bad comments were because I was not well read in religion and subsequently, I was not adding much value to anyone by saying ay kalam. Nevertheless, this is a blog about my personal ideas concerning my personal faith, and even though I feel quite hesitant in continuing in these writings, I believe that if this is how I feel about religion and God, and God Almighty sees through my soul and knows all that I say here and understands my intentions and my beliefs and how I see Him in my soul, then I will not fear the ideas of others because they don’t have to read it or like it. I will not let myself be driven into the corner of guilt because my religion is lacking because I know it is, and I believe that everyone else’s religion is also lacking (on different levels of course), but it is our duty as human beings to search into our souls before searching into books and to understand and be convinced why we follow our faith and how we can contribute to it more without having the burden of guilt to weigh us down, as the burden of guilt will always be there since we will never worship God the way He should be worshipped.

7ay 3ala el Salah – Come to prayer

Everyone says that the single most important religious act is prayer. I stress on act because religion is a matter of the heart and acting is a matter of the world. we don’t pray in our heads or else life would have been so much easier, that’s because if prayer was in the heart and the head only, we’d all hear the Azan, and think “I’m praying now” and forget all about it. The fact that it’s an act is that it requires that we get up, do Wodou’, dress up in a certain way (for girls at least), stand in a certain way, and perform certain rituals that are the sub-actions of praying.

The actions of praying take energy and commitment. Energy because u have to get up and get down and go wash and all that, and commitment because u can go wash and then forget to pray, or get distracted by a phone call. Or even simply forget! So if a person is not committed to praying before actually praying, they won’t pray, will they?!

At some point in my life, I lost both the energy and commitment. I don’t know which was lost first, nor does it matter I think. The point is I stopped praying completely, and it was not easy getting it back without a certain train of thoughts that I am now sharing. So follow carefully.

First argument: there is no doubt that God created us and all that is around us, has bestowed upon us countless gifts, some we understand, others we don’t. So it would only make sense to do what God has asked us as a form of gratitude, or even paying a debt so to speak. If the price of what we have is to pray and fast and all that, then we should do it because we can see and hear and walk and have hands and legs and hearts that beat and brains that keep us alive.

Second argument: it is quite apparent that God does not do anything pointlessly -3abathan, then there is a certain value for praying that I just cannot grasp yet, and maybe if I pray with heart I’ll find it out. Will I pray to figure out the mystery of prayer? Probably not, but I trust God that prayer has some value to me and that value will be revealed to me when I pray with my heart rather than with my head.

Third argument: I love Allah, and I know that even though I may have not been the best follower, He loves me too. Like a parent who is too tired of their child’s mischief, they let them do what they want until they get tired of it and get back to the path on their own, their hearts filled with conviction. So I will do it for my Love, my God, even though I don’t necessarily feel like it. If I do something I’m not necessarily happy about because it would please the person I love on eath, wouldn’t I do something for Him who I love up in heaven?

Fourth argument: God is powerful and scary, so if I don’t pray out of respect for God as the highest power, or for all of the above, then I will pray out of fear of Him.

With that train of thought, I found out that the first thing I think about when I think about God is this utter conviction in His existence, in Islam, and that my salvation is with him and only him, and the absolute last thing was that God should be feared.

Isn’t Allah Grand? Allaho Akbar :)

The beginning of the journey

At some point, I lost my faith. I don’t mean I stopped believing in God or forgot His existence, I mean I became distant; doing any religious task had become a chore. I always felt there is a bond between a person and God, and through that bond a person can tell if God has mercy on them at that time or not. i really believe that mercy on earth is peace of mind and peace of heart. And I could tell that God has not granted me that peace. Through that bond, I felt God is punishing me for my sins by taking away my peace of mind and peace of heart, and to get all that back I am meant to go through a journey. I am writing this blog not because I have gone on that journey and completed it, although at some point I thought I did, but more to document it as I go. I’m not sure if I will ever get there but let’s hope so.

My hope is that by blogging, it will help me keep those ideas that light up my brain alive if I ever lose the light, and maybe it will light up my way and maybe help light someone else’s.