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The Bektashi Order, the Jafari School and the Maliki School each hold a variant, differently accounted stance toward Salat, the daily prayer, in this atlas. Reading each account individually finds two real findings, not three, a posture question shared across the Shia and Sunni line, and one order that does not vary the practice at all but replaces it.

One Posture, Held Across the Shia and Sunni Line

The Jafari School, the legal school of Twelver Shia Islam, holds that prayer is made "with the arms at the sides rather than folded, and prostrate on bare earth or on a tablet of clay rather than on the pile of the carpet." The Maliki School, one of the four Sunni schools of law, holds prayer "with the arms hanging at the sides rather than folded over the body. It is the one posture that tells a Maliki congregation apart on sight." A Shia school and a Sunni school, for their own separate reasons, independently keep the identical unfolded-arms posture, differing further only on where the forehead comes to rest.

A Substitution, Not a Posture

The Bektashi Order's own account does not describe a variant posture at all: "the Bektashi and Alevi communities gather for the cem, an assembly of prayer, sung poetry and the semah danced by men and women together, IN PLACE OF the five daily prayers performed in a mosque." That is a different kind of finding than a folded or unfolded arm. Two schools disagree with the mainstream on how to perform Salat; one order does not perform it in the mosque-based, five-times-daily form at all, replacing it with its own assembly.

Where To Read More

• Salat (Daily Prayer)Devotional RitualsThe prayer itself; three bodies counted, reducing to a shared posture question and one wholesale substitution
• Bektashi OrderGathers for the cem in place of the five daily prayers performed in a mosque, a substitution rather than a variant
• Jafari SchoolArms at the sides, prostration on bare earth or a clay tablet rather than carpet
• Maliki SchoolArms hanging at the sides, the one posture that tells a Maliki congregation apart on sight