Salah (the prescribed prayer)
الصلاة
The prescribed prayer, five times in the day and night, one of the five pillars of Islam; the Qur'an commands establishing it and calls it a timed obligation on the believers, and the hadith adds that other prayers are voluntary.
At a glance
- Era
- The Prophetic Era
- Region
- Global / Diaspora
- Review
- Draft Completeness 2/5 · Help complete it
Summary
"The prayer" is an obligatory worship, one of Islam's five pillars 1. In the Najdi man's hadith the obligation is "five prayers in the day and night", and what exceeds them is voluntary 2.
In the Qur'an
The Qur'an commands establishing the prayer coupled with the zakat: al-Baqara 43. It describes it as "a timed ordinance" upon the believers: al-Nisa' 103. The verse of al-Isra' mentions prayer times: al-Isra' 78.
In the hadith
What is not covered here
The detail of prayer times, its form, its rulings and the schools' disagreements on it will be added in a later batch from the fiqh books, with each position's school identified.
Connections
People and things also explored
Islam (the religion and the term)The shahadaHajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca)Fasting in RamadanZakat (obligatory alms)The five pillars of IslamArba'un 3 — Islam is built on fiveCommand, prohibition and capacity
Sources
- Sahih al-Bukhari, 8
- Sahih al-Bukhari, 46
- Sahih al-Bukhari, 50
- Tanzil Project, Qur'an text v1.1
Cite this page
islam.museum contributors. “Salah (the prescribed prayer)”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/practice/salah/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Accessed 2026-10-12.