Servitude and the Prayer
Wednesday, 4 December 2024
Opens 15 minutes before the session begins.
Foundations, Part 2 This session treats the plainest prayer of the day — the two-unit dawn prayer — as a meeting between two lovers. Having set out the nine rights God holds against a human being, the session asks a practical question: where, in ordinary religious life, are all nine actually exercised at once? The answer is the daily prayer. Every right — over the self, the tongue, the hearing, the sight, the hand, the legs, the stomach — is folded into the physical geometry of a ritual most believers perform on autopilot, five times a day, without ever slowing down to notice. So the session slows down. It walks through a single two-unit prayer stage by stage: the ablution, explained not as hygiene but as the grooming a lover does before a meeting, backed by a narration of Imam al-Sadiq, peace be upon him, that God is beautiful and loves beauty; the entry into the place of prayer; the intention; the Opening chapter of the Qur'an, read as a live dialogue rather than a recitation; and the closing tasbih of Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra — thirty-three beads of praise, then thirty-three more of glorification — ending in a prostration of gratitude on a tablet of Karbala's earth. What is actually happening, physically and otherwise, in the five minutes most people rush through twice before breakfast? What the evening covers The nine rights, mapped onto the body. How a single prayer is built to exercise every right God holds over a person's self, tongue, hearing, sight, hands, legs and stomach. Ablution as courtship, not cleaning. The narration on God loving beauty, and why grooming before prayer is treated as preparation to meet a beloved. The Opening, read as dialogue. A line-by-line walk through al-Fatiha as a two-way conversation rather than a recitation. The tasbih of Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra. Thirty-three beads of praise, then thirty-three more of glorification, and the prostration of gratitude that follows them.
In this session
وَٱذۡكُرِ ٱسۡمَ رَبِّكَ وَتَبَتَّلۡ إِلَيۡهِ تَبۡتِيلٗا
And remember the name of your Lord and devote yourself to Him with [complete] devotion
Quran, Surah Al-Muzzammil (The Enshrouded One), Chapter 73, Verse 8
