Rituals in Islam

SEPTEMBER 2 Rituals in Islam All religions, by dint of ritual and ceremony, give a definite form to these acts of worship. Islam likewise has its specific rites, but lays special emphasis on the spirit in which these are carried out. Moreover, it does not conceive of divine worship as a dichotomous proposition, divided into two equal parts under the headings of form and spirit. Form, in one sense, is only an external manifestation of the spirit. That is to say that spirit dominates in being the vital and indispensable element of every sincere religious act — to which form is a mere ancillary. A hadith pertaining to fasting shows how this act must be illumined by spirit: “One who did not forsake telling lies while on a fast, God has no need of such a person forsaking food and water.” Numerous statements of this kind, enshrined in the Qur’an and Hadith make it clear that, in Islam, ritual practices and spirit are not equal constituents of worship. As elements of religion, they stand in relation to each other as the crucial and the subordinate. Each religious act of worship may, or may not — depending upon its nature and circumstances — have an external form. But whatever the case, ritualized or formless, what is of overarching importance is the zeal which inspires it. While, from the Islamic standpoint, rituals serve partly as palpable identifiers of religious acts or of worship, and partly as physical reinforcements of or prompters to religious ardour, the essence of Islam is its inner spirit. This is something eternal and unassailable, unlike its outer forms which have no lasting significance in being purely external signals of the spiritual inner core. Whenever this reality becomes lodged in the innermost recesses of the individual psyche, its effects are outwardly reflected. Ceremonial acts, sincerely performed are but the material expressions of the incontrovertible inner truth. When, towards the end of his life, the Prophet Muhammad went on his pilgrimage, he laid down specific ways of performing Hajj. More than one lakh of his Companions went alongwith him on this occasion. Subsequently, the Prophet seated himself in the courtyard of the Kabah, where his Companions came with their queries about the procedures to be followed in this very important part of Islamic worship. Most of these questions concerned the rites and their forms. One would say that he had carried out such and such a rite beforehand, while another would say that he had done so at a later stage, thus