The Five-time prayer, Islam’s second pillar, lies at the heart of Muslims’ devotional and spiritual life. Instituted to create an intense...
The Five-time prayer, Islam’s second pillar, lies at the heart of Muslims’ devotional and spiritual life. Instituted to create an intense remembrance of Allah, the prayer, performed through specific bodily movements in close coordination with the total concentration of one’s thoughts on Allah, heals the maladies of both the soul and the body, if performed sincerely.
This book, Medical and Spiritual Benefits of Islamic Prayer, written as an objective study, offers the reader a fascinating journey through the spiritual and the physical benefits of the prayer, analysed from both medical and spiritual perspectives. The study starts with an examination of the importance and the place of prayer in Islam in the light of the Quran and the Sunna. This introductory chapter is also aimed at connecting the real purpose of the prayer, remembrance of Allah, with the main theme of the book.
The following chapter will examine, in the light of the modern psychological and medical theories, the different aspects of the Muslim prayer such as the recitation of the Quran, bodily movements, appointed times for the prayer and the Islamic stress on the collective gathering for the prayer in order to show their deep meanings, encompassing man’s life it its totality. The bodily movements involved in the prayer will be analysed not only in their spiritual and psychological meanings, but also from a medical perspective in relation with the organs involved in the movements and their general way of functioning.
A separate chapter will be dedicated to the relation between the spiritual benefits of prayer from a psychological point of view in light of the modern schools of psychology and counselling. The last chapter will be dedicated to the role of the prayer in the classical Islamic medicine in order to draw a final comparison between the traditional Islamic medical perspective and some of the theories of modern Western science.
