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Why Muslims Pray 5 Times a Day

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“Do you pray FIVE TIMES A DAY?” some of my non-Muslim friends would inquire. “Didn’t you pray yet?” another set of non-Muslim friends would ask. Different people have different perspectives concerning prayers. The latter section is the ones who have been with me since childhood. They have an understanding of Islam and its obligations.

The first set of friends is new to my circle, so they are clueless about why we do these. I’m not judging them because they don’t know why Muslims pray, so we are to educate them about it.

However, what’s unfortunate is most Muslims don’t practice the obligatory prayer though they can. Therefore, it is essential to discuss obligatory prayers and how one feels to do it regularly.

What Exactly is the Five Daily Prayer?

It’s an obligation for Muslims and one of the pillars of Islam. Prayer or in Arabic Salah is the connection between the Creator and the creations. It sets the path to get connected to the one who created. Millions of Muslims around the world follow this practical ritual.

Muslims who understand the benefits of prayers tend to feel as if he/she is standing in front of Him and conversing directly. Every adult who is sane and physically fit must meet this obligation. A child must begin praying at the age of 7, but its parents’ duty to train them.

“You lead by example.” –anonymous

But why is it five times instead of one? Think about it, after praying the early Morning Prayer (Fajr) your mind keeps reminding you to pray Noon Prayer (dhuhr). Likewise, there is a constant reminder of the Creator. The five times prayer will continue as afternoon prayer ( Asr), prayer during Sunset (Maghrib), and the Evening Prayer (Isha).

Therefore, it is more like a reminder that the world is temporary, and you will one day return to God.

“Every soul will taste death, and you will only be given your [full] compensation on the Day of Resurrection. So he who is drawn away from the Fire and admitted to Paradise has attained [his desire]. And what is the life of this world except for the enjoyment of delusion.” –Surah Ali-Imran (3:185).

How Does it Feel to Pray Five Times a Day?

Most of my non-Muslim friends find it meaningful to engage in prayers five times a day. Sometimes it can be how I portray what praying means to me. I have seen and associated people who’d skip praying for reasons that are not approved in Islam. I have also seen people who’d do whatever it takes to perform their obligatory prayer.

So if you are a Muslim, remember, you are the proof of your religion. People around you see and examine things that you do. If you don’t respect and understand the value of Salah, they will not either.

But, if someone experiences the benefits of prayers, they will not be able to overlook it. As someone who practices five times prayer, I can tell you how relaxing it feels once you have performed all five prayers.

If you ask someone who regularly mediates to skip meditation for a day, he/she might be disturbed and might not be in a good mood throughout the day.

So this is how a Muslim who prays five times a day would feel if he/she misses a prayer.

Hence, meditation can be considered the non-Muslim version of prayers.

I’ve seen my parents praying to God, so I had the habit of connecting to God through my prayers from a young age. Some days I’d wake up crying if I miss my evening prayer (Isha). So prayers have been an essential part of my life.

However, my adulthood isn’t a bed of roses, so if I was able to manage the thorns in between, it is because of the prayers. When I’m down, I pray. When I’m happy, I pray. For every emotion, I turn to God, and that hits different.

Well, this doesn’t mean that I’m pious, or I consider myself sinless. Praying helps me in tough situations, and will you understand when you practice it religiously.

How to Make it a Habit to Pray Five times a Day?

There have been days that I missed one or two prayers, but not anymore. I have friends and cousins who struggled to pray Fajr. I helped most of them make praying a habit, and now I’ll share some of the tips with you. But remember, Allah (SWT) is the most merciful if you are trying, he knows it.

1.Try to do it when you hear the call for prayers (Azan) or stop procrastinating

Learn to prioritize; if you are a Muslim, you know that praying is obligatory. *in another five minutes* *after this one video* are the excuses that make you delay prayers or miss it altogether. Thus, put an end card to your reasons by prioritizing prayers.  

You can make it a habit to pray right after you hear the Azan. But I understand sometimes it’s not possible given the work hours and other duties. Therefore, you must keep reminding that there’s a deadline for the prayer, so once you get home, perform the prayer as the first thing. You wouldn’t need more than 15 minutes to take wudhu (wash) and pray, so it’s not too much to ask for. Isn’t it?

Or if you are someone who needs a little motivation, you can ask your mother, friend, or someone to remind you to pray until it becomes a practice.

2. Make it a regular thing or in simple words, a habit

We can’t say 21 day-myth will work for everyone. Habit formation depends on hard work, persistence, and patience, so we can’t rely on the number of days. However, if you understand the meaning of prayers and discussed it with people who pray and how they feel, it will eventually create the need to pray regularly.

Thus, you will work hard to make it a habit. During this practice session, if you miss a prayer or two in between, don’t get hard on yourself. Just relax, and remind yourself why you are trying this in the first place and think about the reward –Jannah!

3. Focus on the health and spiritual benefits of praying

To comprehend the actual need for five times prayers, you need to understand the benefits. By praying, you are enhancing the love for God and your spirituality as a Muslim.

Some of the health benefits that I can share are:

  • Great way to start the day; it’s not only an exercise but also meditation.
  • Risk of arthritis reduces because your joints and bones are treated well.
  • It helps digestion, and through experience, I can say how great I feel when I pray after eating. It feels as if I’m actually helping my body to feel better.
  • Sajadah, or the position in which your forehead touches the ground, supports the blood supply to your brain.
  • Your body regains energy when the energy drains. For example, taking wudhu (wash) for Asr prayer might boost your productivity.

Some of the spiritual benefits are:

  • A reminder about life and death.
  • It helps you to stay humble and down to earth.
  • The best way to connect with Allah (SWT).
  • Offers the perfect balance between life and Islam.
  • Acceptance of the Day of Judgment.
  • Slows down your rat race and helps you to relax and purify your heart and soul.
  • It helps to practice truthfulness, humility, kindness, and patience.
  • A chance to offer thanks to Allah.
  • Reminder to stay on the right track by removing yourself from bad deeds and evils.

“Worry increases stress, whereas prayer releases peace.” – Dr. Bilal Philips

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Jewish Nazism is reality not fiction

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Jewish Nazism

I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.

Read Also: No forgiveness for Jewish Nazism

These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.

But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.

Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.

Read Also: The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?

The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.

In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.

The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.

However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.

In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.

Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.

For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.

Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!

Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.

To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.

Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.

I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.

A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?

Words can kill; words do kill.

Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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I’m most definitely Palestinian!

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Palestinian

In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.

The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.

Read Also: The age-old Palestinian-fear (of the Israeli thirst)

The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.

Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.

The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.

Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.

I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.

(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.

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The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

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It is really ludicrous to see how dishonest the U.S “mediators” constantly demand that the Palestinians display more “good will” toward Israel at a time when Israel continues to perpetrate a real Holocaust against the hapless and helpless Palestinaians and steal Palestinian land in broad daylight.

It seems amply clear that the current Palestinian leadership, i.e. the Palestinian Authority (PA)  led by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, neither learns from its own blunders nor from other people’s blunders. This is really a gigantic disaster befalling the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause.

How else can one relate to the unrelenting illogical insistence of the the whole world on accepting the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, as “mediator and honest broker” between us and our murderous tormentors and grave-diggers, Israel?

Read Also: The US and IsraelThe dog versus the wagging tail.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on American foreign policy in the Middle East to know that the U.S represents the problem, not the solution, given its long-standing embrace of Israeli fascism and expansion.  After all, it is the US that not only enabled Israel to actively pursue its lebensraum policy at the expense of its neighbors but consistently shield it from any accountability or international condemnation.

Today, the U.S. administration is criticizing Palestinian “unilateralism” in reference to desperate PA efforts to get the UN Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and agree on a deadline for ending Israel’s Nazi-like occupation.

Well, we all know that the U.S. is being pornographically hypocritical when it accuses the virtually vanquished Palestinians of acting unilaterally as if its spoilt nefarious daughter, Israel, were ever acting in full conformity with international law.

Well, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Ereikat: Don’t be too gullible, too sheepish. Ask your American interlocutors, e.g. Mr. John Kerry, the following questions:

Since when did Israel ever behave bilaterally rather than unilaterally?

Was the usurpation of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous people at the hands of Jewish terrorist gangs hailing from Eastern Europe, a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the building of hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the transfer of 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on a land that belongs not to them a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the wanton demolition of some 30,000 Palestinian homes by Israel a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the annexation of the bulk of the West Bank and East Jerusalem a bilateral or a unilateral act?

And what about this ugly structure, called Separation wall, which resulted in the theft of thousands of acres of private Palestinian land? Was it a bilateral or a unilateral act?

I could go on and on and on listing America’s hypocritical and duplicitous stands on Palestinian grievances and Israeli crimes. Indeed, the U.S dishonest stand on the Palestinian plight has only been consistent in its moral depravity. Indeed, hypocrisy in its most brazen form has always been and continues to be the modus operandi of American policy toward the Palestinian issue. I know it is politically incorrect to speak in this tone. However, truth must not be another victim of the dark evil embrace between the U.S. and Israel.

But morality is not and has never been part of American politics or policies, especially foreign policy. This is why the world looks so ugly, so gloomy and so unjust.

The U.S. is insisting that only a “negotiated” settlement to the Palestinian issue would be acceptable to the U.S.

Read Also: The Palestinian Authority: confused, frustrated and corrupt

In other words, Israel must always have the final say as to any possible peace deal with the Palestinians.

But since Israel would never ever end its occupation or dismantle the settlements, let alone allow for the repatriation of the refugees, it means there can be no negotiated settlement unless the Palestinians agree to surrender to Jewish Nazism. But that will never happen as Muslims, including the Palestinian people, would never allow the Ramallah leadership or any other leadership to commit adultery with the honorable Palestinian cause.

Let’s be honest. The purportedly honest American broker or mediator is neither honest nor a broker or mediator. The proverbial American judge is simply telling the insolent rapist (Israel) and the vanquished rape victim (the Palestinians) to sort it out amongst yourselves. Do we have to be the smartest humans on earth to understand the implications of this brutal ugliness?

It is tantamount to a total American embrace of Israeli fascism. It means that the American stance is actually Israel’s stance. It also means that that the U.S. would never accept or condone any settlement that Israel doesn’t accept.

That is why the Palestinians need to have a moment of truth with themselves.
And the message they need to internalize is that they would have to wait ages if they continued to put their trust in the U.S. to pressure Israel to walk in the path of peace.

Let us face it. Israel will never walk in the path of peace unless it is pressured and bullied to do so. However, Israel would never ever walk in the path of peace as long as it continues to receive nuclear submarines from Germany and the most advanced fighter jets from the U.S.

In a nut shell, America can’t and won’t exert any meaningful pressure on Israel to end its N-a-z-i-like occupation. We all know that Israel controls the American government or at least controls those who control the American government. Israel is intoxicated by its arrogance of power and Talmudic insolence. And the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, is not in a position to be an honest mediator and to impose a deal on Israel or even convince her to allow for one that would give the Palestinian a semblance of justice.

What should be done?

We must go ahead with our efforts at the U.N. Security Council, irrespective of American threats to veto any resolution favorable to the Palestinian cause. At least casting the veto would embarrass America itself and its treacherous Arab allies (they are not actually allies but cheap slaves and puppets as we all know).

We Palestinians must be confident of our inevitable triumph over Zionism and its evils. Yes, it may take time, but eventually Zionism won’t live forever in a sea where hundreds of millions live.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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