Some Mystical Dimensions of Sallah.

  Of all the 5 pillars of Islamic religious practice, the prayer or Sallah is perhaps the most important, apart from the all-necessary first pillar of the Shahadah or pronouncement of the creed without which all the others would not be valid. The Sallah /Prayer is the occasion of and opportunity for the profoundest communication with Almighty God.

  Before the prayer can validly be performed, the one praying must do 2 things. The first is the ritual ablution or Wudu in which the one praying must make fresh contact with water or earth to cleanse himself of false being and false knowing, a renewal of contact with the fundamentals of becoming. The second is the conscious formulating of the intention (niyyah) to perform the Sacred rite, the aim of which is to ensure as far as is possible that the performance of the rite (Sallah) is not merely habitual, like some animal instinct, but fully conscious and deliberate, as befits the human state.

  Note that there are 4 basic postures of/in Sallah - - the standing position or qiyam, the bowing position or ruku'u, the prostration or sujud and the sitting position or Julus. These positions or postures are entered/heralded by the uttering of the Takbir or 'Allahu Akbar, God is Greater', as if saying that all initiative is God's.

The standing position oin Sallah might be seen as an image of dominion and divinity, the bowing as the intermediary position of the human state, the prostration of the Terrestial and cosmic state, while the sitting position may be seen as an image of the overall stability of God in creation. The prostration, as that posture most indicative of profound and abject slavehood, might thus be seen as an image of the self-annihilation or fana, while the re-emergence into the light in the sittng position might be seen as a symbol of settling in God or baqa.

  Also, in an interesting way, the 4 postures of the prayer rite are a sort of calligraphy in motion in so far as each posture in sequence has something of the letters which make up the Name of Allah : the alif being the standing :the connecting lams the bowing :the curling circle of the ha' the prostration :and the sitting position representing the pause or stabilised breathing of the ha.

Finally, one might see in the standing or the alif the aloneness of the Unique Being, in the bowing His Creative inclination towards His creation, in the prostration His deep involvement in His cosmos and in the sitting His balancing and establishing of Himself as the Real in all His modes, Tabaraka Wa Ta'ala.