Salat, the five daily prayers, is the second of the Five Pillars of Islam and the act of worship the Quran commands most insistently, though the number five and the details of posture come from the practice (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad rather than from the text alone. The prayers fall at dawn, midday, mid-afternoon, sunset and night, and each is a fixed cycle of standing, bowing, and prostration (sujud), performed facing the Kaaba in Mecca after ritual ablution and the call to prayer.
Its discipline is corporate even when performed alone: the times, the direction, the words (opening with the Fatiha, the first sura) and the movements are shared across the Muslim world, so that the rite binds the individual body into a single orientation and schedule. Friday's midday prayer is congregational and carries a sermon. The theological weight the tradition places on it is heavy, a hadith calls it the first deed a person will be asked about on the Day of Judgement, and its five-fold recurrence is understood to keep the remembrance of God threaded through the ordinary hours of the day.