Practices
Fajr
Devotional Practices
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Origin 610 to 632 CE
The dawn prayer, the first of the five daily prayers and the only one whose window opens before sunrise. It consists of two units of prayer, and the recitation in both is said aloud. Its window runs from the first true light on the horizon until the disc of the sun appears, which in high latitudes in summer compresses the night to almost nothing and has produced a substantial modern juristic literature on what a worshipper in Reykjavik or Tromso should do. In Sunni practice the call to prayer for Fajr alone adds the line as-salatu khayrun min an-nawm, prayer is better than sleep, after the two summonses to prayer and success; this addition is not made in Twelver Shia practice, and Shia scholarship generally treats it as a later insertion. Fajr is the prayer most often described in the hadith literature as the hardest to keep, and attendance at it in congregation is one of the conventional measures of a community's seriousness.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodThe five daily prayers are fixed within the Prophet's lifetime 1 Place of OriginMecca and Medina, Arabia 2 The five daily prayers were fixed within the Prophet's own lifetime. Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 3 Practice
Who Performs ItAll adherents of the tradition 1 ObligationObligatory 1Tradition: Islam Solitary or CommunalPerformed alone or together 1 Form
Posture and Bodily FormA cycle of rak'as, each one standing with recitation, bowing, two prostrations with forehead to the ground, and sitting 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteIn high latitudes during summer the window for Fajr can compress the night to almost nothing, since it runs only from the first true light to sunrise, and this has produced a substantial modern juristic literature addressing what a worshipper in cities such as Reykjavik or Tromso should do. 1 Controversy
Point in DisputeSunni practice adds the line prayer is better than sleep after the two calls to prayer for Fajr alone; Twelver Shia practice omits it, and Shia scholarship generally treats the addition as a later insertion into the call. 1 Learn More
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.
Recited Aloud, and Its Standing in Law
Unlike the two midday prayers, Fajr is recited audibly: the worshipper or the prayer-leader voices the opening Fatiha and a following passage of the Qur'an aloud, a feature it shares with the sunset and night prayers. Because its window is narrow and closes decisively at sunrise, jurists across the Sunni schools discuss carefully what a person should do who wakes too late, the dominant position being that the missed prayer is performed as soon as one rises. In Twelver Shia practice the same dawn obligation stands, prayed in its own time and not combined with any other.
The dawn hour carries a distinct weight in Islamic devotion beyond the obligation itself. The Qur'an calls the recitation of dawn mashhud, witnessed, understood in the commentaries as attended by the angels of night and day at their changing of watch, and the pre-dawn stillness is the classic setting for the voluntary night vigil and for supplication held to be especially answered.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Element Of
Held Differently
The Shafii school recites the qunut supplication in the dawn prayer every day, where the other schools keep it for the Witr or for times of calamity.
Sources
1. Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice
Marion Holmes Katz, Cambridge University Press, 2013Chapter 1, on the emergence of the five-time scheduleView the Source 2. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition
P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.), Brill, 2005View the Source 3. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source The Qur'an
The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary
Jami at-Tirmidhi
Muhammad al-TirmidhiBook of prayer, the reports of Jibril leading the prayers at the two ends of each windowView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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