Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE WORSHIPFUL ACTS t 221
Friday Prayer and the Mosque
The Muslim’s daily prayers might be said in private in any decent
and dignified setting, but the noon prayer on Friday had a special
liturgical significance in that it was a prescribed congregational
prayer. Friday came to be called the “day of assembly” (yawm aljuma),
and the place of that congregation was known as the “assembly”
(jami). This latter is what we call a mosque, though the
English word goes back to another Arabic word describing another
function of the same place: masjid, a place of prostration or
worship.
The Muslim Friday began its career as a reaction, Muhammad’s
own reaction, it appears, to the Jewish Sabbath, once again in the
sense of deliberately choosing a day for common prayer that
would distinguish the Muslims of Medina from the Jews there. On
that day the community prayer is celebrated, and though it is not
formally a day of rest, in the sense that normal activities, usually
commercial, had to be suspended, it is becoming assimilated by
Muslims worldwide into an expanding notion of the “weekend”
as nonworking days.
The first mosque in Islam was the courtyard of Muhammad’s
own house in Medina. Its successors in the Islamic diaspora served
much the same purpose as the original building, a simple structure
used indifferently for political assembly and liturgy. There were
few architectural requirements: flowing water for ablution before
prayer in an open court and a tower or minaret from which the
muezzin might summon the faithful to prayer; within, a niche
(mihrab) to note the qibla, or prayer direction (toward Mecca),
and a raised throne (minbar)—as opposed to the Christian pulpit,
which is a kind of raised podium—which originally served as a
sort of political rostrum but which developed, with the progressive
restriction of the mosque to liturgical functions, into a pulpit for
the Friday sermon.
The mosque is the single most distinctive sign of a Muslim community.
In the Islamic lands the cities are filled with them, generally
built by private rather than public funds from the already
noted waqf, and sited wherever the will and the wealth of the