Morality and Salah Part I: The Dilemma
Just about every Muslim knows that the observance of salah (the five daily ritual prayers) is an obligation. By the grace of Allah, there is no shortage of reminders and exhortations to that effect. But suppose I asked you what kind of obligation it is. What would you say? My fear is that you would say a religious obligation. And why would I fear that? Isn’t that a fact?
Well yes, it is. But what I have observed in my time teaching is that today Religion is not really understood on its own terms as the primary source of knowledge and guidance regarding life’s most important questions. Rather, the supremacy of other sources of knowledge is reinforced constantly through mass education, and now popular education, so that Religion is reduced to a limited, cultural sphere- sometimes quaint, sometimes curious – never really necessary.
Whether it is the atrocities of the Church in the past or the abuses of some clergy, terror cell, cult or other in the present there is a powerful refrain in popular education that brings the moral authority of Religion into question with no alternative in sight other than nebulous notions of universal human values. So Religion is no longer seen as the standard of moral uprightness. It would be good to say that Muslims are not affected by that trend which, like everything else these days, is global. But can we?
I don’t think we can claim to be unaffected. And I would advance as evidence the general attitude to the ritual prayer, apparent in the way those who pray are regarded, among Muslims, east and west. Traditionally in Muslim societies people of exceptional moral standing were known as zuhad (ascetics), awliya (saints), ‘ubad (ardent in voluntary ritual worship), and the like not simply because of their observance of the five daily prayers, which was (and still is) a moral and legal obligation, but because they went far beyond that obligation. That going the extra mile made them exceptional.
When no extra effort is made nothing exceptional takes place. So the reality is that there is nothing morally exceptional about a Muslim merely observing what is obligatory. He is simply a believing human being of basic decency and integrity. Yet today he is multazim (practicing), mutadayin (outwardly religious), shaykh (cleric) and a host of other honorifics that serve to acknowledge mere religious identity and basic conformity as things of note. This indicates that the public standard of decency and uprightness is at a very low ebb indeed.
We can and should begin to address this dilemma as individuals by coming to terms with the fact that the observance of the daily ritual prayers is a moral and legal obligation as opposed to a quaint token of cultural significance (“religious” in modern terms). By way of illustrating what that distinction entails we could consider the nature of moral and legal obligations and connect that understanding to morality and salah… Continued here.
