A Dictionary of Islam Being a cyclopedia of the...

Hospitality is enjoined in the Qurʾān. Sūrah iv. 40: “Show kindness to your parents, and to your kindred, and to orphans, and to the poor, and to your neighbour who is akin and to your neighbour who is a stranger, and the companion who is strange, and to the son of the road.”

HOURS OF PRAYER. The terms “Hours of Prayer” and “Canonical Hours,” being used in the Christian Church (see Johnson’s Engl. Canons and Canons of Cuthbert, ch. 15), we shall consider under this title the stated periods of Muḥammadan prayer. [PRAYER.] They are five: (1) Fajr (فجر), daybreak; (2) Z̤uhr (ظهر), when the sun begins to decline at midday; (3) ʿAṣr (عصر), midway between z̤uhr and mag͟hrib; (4) Mag͟hrib (مغرب), evening; (5) ʿIshāʾ (عشاء), when the night has closed in. According to the Traditions (Mishkāt, book xxiv. ch. vii. pt. 1), Muḥammad professed to have received his instructions to say prayer five times a day during the Miʿrāj, or the celebrated night journey to heaven. He said, God first ordered him to pray fifty times a day, but that Moses advised him to get the Almighty to reduce the number of canonical hours to five, he himself having tried fifty times for his own people with very ill success!

It is remarkable that there is but one passage in the Qurʾān, in which the stated hours of prayer are enjoined, and that it mentions only four and not five periods. Sūratu ʾr-Rūm, xxx. 16, 17: “Glorify God when it is evening (masāʾ), and at morning (ṣubḥ),—and to Him be praise in the heavens and in the earth,—and at afternoon (ʿashī), and at noon-tide (z̤uhr).” But al-Jalālān, the commentators, say all are agreed that the term, “when it is masāʾ” (evening or night), includes both sunset and after sunset, and therefore both the mag͟hrib and ʿishāʾ prayers are included.

Three hours of prayer were observed by the Jews. David says, “Evening, morning, and at noon will I pray.” (Ps. lv. 17.) Daniel “kneeled upon his knees three times a day.” These three hours of the Jews seem to have been continued by the Apostles (see Acts iii. 1), and were transmitted to the early church in succeeding ages, for Tertullian speaks of “those common hours which mark the divisions of the day, the third, sixth, and ninth, which we observe in scripture to be more solemn than the rest.” (De Orat., c. 25.) And Clement of Alexandria says, “If some fix stated hours of prayer, as the third, sixth, and ninth, the man of knowledge prays to God throughout his whole life.” (Stom. l. vii. c. 7, sect. 40.) Jerome says, “There are three times in which the knees are bent to God. Tradition assigns the third, the sixth, and the ninth hour.” (Com. in Dan., c. vi. 10.)

In the third century there seems to have been five stated periods of prayer, for Basil of Cappadocia speaks of five hours as suitable for monks, namely, the morning, the third hour, the sixth, the ninth, and the evening. (Regulæ fusius Tract. Resp. ad Qu., 37, sections 3–5.)

It is therefore probable that Muḥammad obtained his idea of five stated periods of prayer during his two journeys to Syria. But he changed the time, as will be seen from the table annexed, which was drawn up by Mr. Lane at Cairo, and shows the times of Muḥammadan prayer with the apparent European time of sunset, in or near the latitude of Cairo at the commencement of each zodiacal month:—