5 Pillars Made Plain – Intro to Pillar 2 – Prayer

Assalamu alaykum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon you all, Abdullah oduro. And welcome back. A young man comes home around 2am in the morning from hanging out with his friends. He opens the door with his keys. And lo and behold, his mother standing there with her arms crossed. And you know what comes next?

She's asking a number of questions. Where have you been? Why are you late? You told me you were coming at this time. When he sees this, he keeps it moving, he keeps walking in the direction of his room, whereupon his mother is following him. And she keeps asking him these legitimate questions. He all of a sudden turns around and lashes out at his mother. Immediately he feels bad about that. He goes to his room, shuts the door angrily and just drops down on his knees and starts to pray. From what he knew how to pray, putting his hands together like this, closing his eyes, puts his head up and just starts crying.

And what he's saying as he's crying is, God guide me, please guide me, please guide me. He doesn't even know what to say. But he knows what's in his heart. He's visualizing the things that he's done to his mother. He's visualizing the actions and things that he's done, have no direction. And he's asking God for guidance for direction for structure in his life, but not just structure on a superficial level structure that has some substance and foundation to it. Now here, he's looking for something. He's never prayed like this before. He seen it on television, he seen his mom and her friends at church. And he used to go to church, and he would call herself Christian, but he wasn't

really practicing it at a high level. Rather, he was hanging out with his friends and trying to find some direction in life. Prayer, he tuned out in order to tune in. Now people will tune out in different ways. You know, some people may take drugs, in order to tune out in order to tune out of reality, to go into some other realm that they want to go into. But sometimes people will use an individual to tune out to take them into a certain type of realm that they want to go into or another type of reality. But we in Islam, in particular, in Islam, when one wants to get closer to God, there is prayer that's instructed, not every religion has some type of prayer of turning

towards God. But in Islam, in particular, when talking about the pillars, it is the five daily prayers that we are speaking about. Now, this prayer primarily is a means of establishing that link in connection to their Creator, that God is speaking to them in the strongest way possible, which is the Koran, to wearing their prayer, they recite the Quran. And also you can speak to God by asking him, praising him, asking him for his virtues and praising him for his virtues. So in this session, we're going to talk about these five daily prayers, primarily the who, what, when, where and why. And we ask Allah subhana wa Taala to make use of those that understand these five W's of the prayer

to make you consistent upon it as salaam alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu. Thank you.