The Obligation of Five Daily Prayers

The Obligation of Five Daily Prayers is the daily religious duty that Mahound describes as having been imposed on the faithful during his ascent. In his account, its reduction from forty prayers to five follows Moses’ counsel, but the rule appears within a narrative preoccupied with the uncertainty of revelation: Mahound is troubled by doubt, while Gibreel Farishta listens without supplying answers. The obligation is therefore both a practical command and part of the novel’s larger examination of who speaks with divine authority.

The Rule in Mahound’s Account

Mahound recounts the duty during his listening, in a passage where Gibreel Farishta seems bound to him in an uncertain relation: each may be dreaming the other. Mahound recalls being carried to the Throne, where Allah laid upon the faithful the burden of forty prayers a day. On the return journey, he met Moses, who judged the burden too heavy and urged him to go back and plead for fewer.

Mahound says that he returned four times. Each time Moses told him the number remained too high and sent him back again; by the fourth return, the duty had been reduced to five prayers. Mahound then refused to ask for any further reduction, feeling ashamed to plead again after Allah’s generosity. The final number is thus narrated not as a demand Mahound simply accepts without question, but as the outcome of negotiation, counsel, and his own decision to stop asking.

Doubt and the Problem of Revelation

The account comes amid Mahound’s distress over the resistance of people who, despite witnessing miracles, continue to worship Lat, Manat, and Uzza. He wonders whether the goddesses might be angels and whether accepting them could help win the city’s people to his faith. His questions include whether Allah must remain unyielding and what, in consequence, he should recite. Gibreel Farishta remains silent, leaving Mahound’s uncertainty unanswered.

The prayer command is distinct from the later public recitation in the poetry tent, but the novel places both within its sustained uncertainty about the source and reliability of sacred speech. Mahound publicly recites The Star; after two further verses, he recites verses that honor Lat, Uzza, and Manat. Abu Simbel and Hind respond by submitting, and the congregation erupts in competing reactions. After a subsequent struggle with Gibreel Farishta, Mahound concludes that the recitation came from the Devil and returns to Jahilia to erase it. Gibreel Farishta’s perspective complicates that explanation: he claims to have supplied both the original verses and their repudiation. This episode does not identify the five-prayer rule itself as altered; rather, it makes the authority of recitation and its interpretation an unsettled question around the rule.

Recording and Transmission

The novel further examines how religious language acquires authority through the act of writing. Salman the Persian later recounts that, after a dream in which he wondered whether he had seen events from Gibreel Farishta’s perspective or Shaitan’s, he began changing what Mahound recited. His alterations grew from small substitutions to more consequential changes, and Mahound initially failed to notice them. Salman’s account makes the scribe a participant in the transmission of revelation, while also keeping his own motives and conclusions inside a personal retrospective narrative.

This episode does not establish that Salman changed the five-prayer command. Its relevance is broader: the rule belongs to a novel in which speech, memory, recitation, and written record do not remain cleanly separable. The acknowledgments also state that the Quran quotations in the book are composites of existing English versions, with additions by the author. The prayer rule is therefore presented as part of the novel’s constructed narrative of revelation, not as an unmediated documentary quotation.

Daily Duty and the Pilgrimage Command

Ayesha’s later command to the people of Titlipur offers a separate example of religious obligation. She tells the panchayat that the villagers must walk to Mecca, kiss the Black Stone in the Kaaba, and then cross the sea on foot when its waters part. The villagers vote unanimously to obey. When Muhammad Din considers providing litters for the old and infirm, his wife insists that the command requires walking; only the youngest infants are exempted from walking and are to be carried in rotation. The villagers pool food, bedding, utensils, and transport animals, while Mirza Saeed Akhtar tries unsuccessfully to halt their preparations.

The pilgrimage develops into a public spectacle and a dangerous undertaking, not an enactment of the five daily prayers. By the ninth week, journalists, politicians, business sponsors, tourists, and religious opponents are following or addressing the march; leaflets dispute Ayesha’s claim to the foot-pilgrimage tradition. The pilgrims advance only about two miles a day, and Khadija dies during the journey. When the group eventually reaches the Arabian Sea, Ayesha, Mishal Akhtar, and the villagers walk into the water and do not reappear. Mirza Saeed Akhtar and several others survive after entering the sea to search for them; the pilgrimage ends, and the authorities question the survivors. Set against this exceptional collective ordeal, the five-prayer rule represents a repeated daily discipline. Together, the episodes show how commands attributed to sacred authority can organize conduct at very different scales, from the recurring duties of the faithful to a whole community’s perilous journey.