The Prayer at First Light

Fajr is the dawn prayer, the first of the five obligatory salah that structure the Muslim day and one of the acts by which Islam is most visibly kept. It is prayed in the window between the appearance of true dawn, the horizontal spread of light along the horizon, distinguished in the tradition from a false pre-dawn glow, and the moment the sun's rim clears the horizon. Its obligatory core is short: two rak'ah, the paired cycles of standing, bowing and prostration that are the unit of all Islamic prayer, preceded by two recommended sunnah rak'ah that the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have valued more highly than the world and everything in it.

Among the five, Fajr is treated as the hardest to keep and therefore the most telling. It falls when sleep is heaviest, and a body of hadith presents faithfulness to it as a near-measure of sincerity, since no one is watching. The call to prayer for Fajr alone carries an extra line, as-salatu khayrun min an-nawm, prayer is better than sleep, inserted after the summons to success.