says that he heard the Holy Prophet say, If one of you has a river at his door in which he washes himself five times a day, what do you think? Would it leave any dirt on him? The Companions said, It would not leave any dirt on him (and he would be perfectly clean). The Holy Prophet said, This is an example of the five prayers, with which Allāh blots off all the evils of a man” (Bu. 9:6). There are many other ḥadīth in which it is stated that prayer is a means of suppressing the evil tendencies of man (kaffārah). The reason is plain. In 20:14, “the remembrance of Allāh” is stated to be the object of keeping up prayer, while in 29:45, it is stated that “the remembrance of Allāh is the greatest restraint” upon sin. A little consideration will show that a law generally requires a sanction behind it, and behind all Divine laws which relate to the development of man and to his moral betterment, the only sanction is a belief in the great Author of those laws. The oftener, therefore, a man reverts to prayer, to that state in which, disengaging himself from all worldly attractions, he feels the Divine presence as an actual fact, the greater is his certainty about the existence of God, and the greater the restraint upon the tendency to break that law. Prayer, thus, by checking the evil tendencies of man, purifies his heart of all evil, and sets him on the right road to the development of his inner faculties.
The service of prayer is divided into two parts, one to be said in private and the other to be performed in congregation, preferably in a mosque. While the private prayer is meant simply for the development of the inner self of man, the public one has other ends as well in view, ends, indeed, that make the Islamic prayer a mighty force in the unification of the human race. In the first place, this gathering of all people living in the same vicinity five times daily in the mosque is a help to the establishment of healthy social relations. In the daily prayer services these relations are limited to a narrow circle, i.e., only to members of the same neighbourhood, but the circle becomes wider in the weekly Friday service which gathers together all Muslim members of a particular locality and still wider in the two great ‘Īd gatherings. Far more important than this, however, is the levelling of social differences brought about by means of