From Dawn to Dusk: studying the origin of the Islamic fivefold daily liturgy in the Qur’ān

Abstract: Despite prayer being one of the most central tenets of Islam, this subject has drawn the attention of surprisingly little scholarship, especially when it comes to studying its origin against pre-Islamic analogues. Thus, this thesis proposes a reconstruction of the very early history of the fivefold daily Islamic liturgy, attempting also to weigh the extent of the influence that pre-Islamic religions, primarily Middle Eastern Christianity and Judaism, might have had in its development. To do so, the thesis engages with the Qur’ānic verses disciplining the number and times dedicated to worship, arranges them following Theodor Nöldeke’s chronological framework, and closely interprets them in conversation with both modern scholarship and Classical Islamic traditional, exegetical, and lexicographical sources. The information retrieved in the Qur’ān is subsequently contextualized with historical information on the socio-religious environment of VII century Arabia as it transpires from the Qur’ān through polemics, but also relevant scholarship in the fields of history, liturgical and Qur’ānic studies, and material culture. The thesis concludes that it is possible to identify and analyze four different stages of liturgical development during the formative years of Islam, where Eastern Christian and Jewish influence on ṣalāt came into play and overlapped to varying degrees as the early Muslim community structured their changeful relations with the monotheistic communities of their time and place. This process, here analyzed in its entirety, reached its culmination during the Medinan period of revelation (622-632), where the institution of the fivefold daily liturgy, seemingly adopting the Eastern Christian Liturgy of the Hours as a model, finally took place. The establishment of the five daily prayers thus mirrors analogous ritual changes (such as the fixation of the prayer direction from Jerusalem to Mecca and the institution of Ramaḍān’s fasting supplanting that of Yom Kippur) that can be read as part of the early Islamic community’s attempt to articulate a distinct socio-religious identity from the other monotheistic, and specifically Jewish, communities of Medina.