Importance of Ritual Prayer and Ritual Purity

One of the five pillars of Islam is the ritual prayer (salat; in Persian and in Turkish, namaz) to be performed five times a day at prescribed hours between the moment before sunrise and the beginning of complete darkness. Early Muslim ascetics and mystics regarded ritual prayer, in accordance with the Prophet's saying, as a kind of ascension to Heaven, as a mi'raj that brought them into the immediate presence of God.

"Ritual prayer is the key to Paradise," says a tradition; but for the mystics, it aaas even more. Some of them connected the word salat with the root wasala, "to arrive, be united"; thus, prayer became the time of connection, the moment of proximity to God. Did not the Qur'an repeatedly state that all of creation was brought into being for the purpose of worshiping God? Thus, those who wanted to gain special proximity to the Lord, and prove their obedience and love, were, without doubt, those who attributed the most importance to ritual prayer. They might even be able to make the angel of death wait until their prayer was finished.

One of the prerequisites of ritual prayer is that ritual purity (tahara) be performed according to the strict rules laid down in the Prophetic tradition. The mystics laid great stress on the meticulous performance of the ablutions, which became, for them, symbols of the purification of the soul. A good translator of the feelings of his fellow mystics, Shibli said: "Whenever I have neglected any rule of purification, some vain conceit will rise in my heart."

Hagiographical literature is filled with stories about Sufis who indulged in ritual purification to the extent that they would perform the great ablution (ghusl) before every prayer or before visiting their spiritual director, which was, for them, a religious duty comparable to prayer. Some would purify themselves in a river even in the middle of the Central Asian winter; others would become enraptured at the very moment the water for ablution was poured over their hands. And a number of Sufis boasted of being able to perform the morning prayer while still in ritual purity from evening prayer, meaning that they had neither slept nor been polluted by any bodily function. Some of them even reached a state of remaining in ritual purity for several days.***

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam)