Why Does God Even Care (Where I Put My Hands in Prayer)?
Organized religion when organized religion is weird
A few years ago, a young man asked me, “Why’s God even care where I put my hands when I pray?” He sighed as if the absurdity was obvious — and assumed I shared his frustration. He added, “Doesn’t God have more important things to do?” I’ve given sermons about the second question because it reveals a common misunderstanding of tawheed, the Muslim understanding of God: One, Unique, Self-Sufficient in all things.
Since we believe that, we can’t believe God has more important things to do, not in the sense that you and I would, at least. Human limits don’t apply to God. The Creator has all knowledge of all things but also all power over all things. The Creator tells us He “does not tire, and does not sleep,” because the Creator wants us to remember He’s undying and unflagging; the way we think of priorities just doesn’t apply.
God can attend to the operation of every star in every galaxy, know the place of every grain of sand on every beach that was or will be, and still hear your prayers. Even if your prayer is for the Bengals to win the Super Bowl.
God won’t necessarily respond to our prayers when we want, or how we want, but all the same God is always responding. Because God’s powers are unlimited. We on the other hand have to prioritize because there’s only so much time, energy, or resources we’ve got. Without understanding that, we can’t appreciate God. Parents and educators need to know that so our kids and students internalize that.
But the first question matters too.
Why does God care where I put my hands when I pray?
Why does God care what I eat, or what I wear, or what I spend my time with, or who I marry?
I’m sure we’ve all heard some variant of that question. And it’d seem (superficially at least) disconnected from what I wrote above, if not actually at odds with it—if God is Invisible, Invincible, and Indivisible, if He’s always there when we need Him, if He commands and controls each and every element of existence, then how do we go from there to apparently ordinary things like God prescribing what seem like such mundane, ordinary, tiny details? Unless the two really are connected.
The Assumption Behind the Question
When we get questions, it’s important to get where they’re coming from.
We’re raising kids in a culture that was deeply shaped by a religion that doesn’t have a legal tradition like Islam (and Judaism), where religious observance in conspicuous, embodied, visible ways might be alien, sometimes is framed as foreign, and often is experienced as uncomfortable (that’s why, in really outlandish instances, you get things like the hijab ban in France, with some apologists claiming that “real” religion is only on the inside, which I’ll get to in a minute.)
Nowadays though even that culture is retreating and in its place, a more disorganized, amorphous spirituality, which looks skeptically at traditional religion, is rising—far fewer Americans belong to old-school religions than did before, and certainly in our kids’ generation(s). How do we as Muslim parents and educators teach through that? What follows in this and subsequent posts are reasons why God puts so much emphasis on so-called little things.
But it’s important to note a few big things first.
1. These don’t appear in any particular order. I’m sharing them in shorter and digestible bits.
2. These might have different kinds of appeal to different kinds of kids, parents and communities. I’m providing these as suggestions—you know the language and frame that lands best.
4. It’s so important for us to remember that although Islam doesn’t demand we agree on everything, and though Islam should give us options for different kinds of communities—a simple example from the past are different madhhabs, and from the present might be a choice between different kinds of mosques—all the same Islam loves community (though esteems, above all else, our individual responsibility).
The desire for and celebration of shared religious life puts us at odds with a lot of assumptions about religion today, but that’s okay. We should be true to our faith, not the trends of a particular moment.
In fact, I’d go so far as to insist that if religions aren’t shared, they’re about as useful as languages without grammar—we are a social species, full stop. If games don’t have shared rules, nobody would play or watch or care about them. If languages didn’t have shared vocabularies, well, you wouldn’t be reading this. And if religions and ethical traditions didn’t have shared expectations, we’d have no moral code to live by, no way to say “that’s wrong!” Religion is shared because faith is part of life, and life is shared, and no one, anywhere, ever, was an island.
But how do we get from there to prayer, to explaining why Islam is so invested in the (supposedly) small things?
The So-Called Small Things, Part I
Below, I share some of the reasons that the small things matter. (More posts to come, with more reasons!) They might help you understand why Islam insists on specific practices, focusing on what might seem like irrelevant details. As always, I’d love for you to respond back with comments and questions.
I. Aim Small, Miss Small
Teaching the middle school boys, our weekly halaqas often fall during prayer times, which means I ask them to pray (to see what they might need to review), then we do du‘a together, and then practice some of the adhkar that can follow. One thing we talk about more frequently than not: Are your knees covered? (Boys like shorts, at least until fall, at which point they still do, but their parents do not).
They’re young, but should know that when they come of age, they’re supposed to cover their knees, even in front of other men (with some exceptions); traditional Muslim cultures go further—I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad or his peers wear shorts except in the rarest of circumstances, reflecting our belief that how we dress, even in casual circumstances, should reflect our natural dignity and nobility.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
For folks not raised in a traditional faith community, this might seem really weird—why am I concerned with the details of their prayer? How they’re standing? Does that really matter? Shouldn’t sincerity be central?
A lot of this comes from specifically American Christian and popular assumptions about what faith is and isn’t. We need to make the differences clear, not to put anyone else down, but to understand our own faith. So let’s take this one as one example of a small thing, a little detail that might seem trivial, but that Islam includes. How do we answer a student who asks, “why’s God care if my knees are showing?”
But before we do, let’s acknowledge that parents and educators must have priorities. We don’t put the cart before the horse, the secondary before the primary. Just as someone aspiring to make the basketball team should worry about what that requires first, so too should believers (as worshippers and as teachers) focus on what’s more important. Maybe when kids are struggling with the big picture, we don’t need to insist on the small things. Or maybe we can help them see how the small things serve the bigger picture. Yes, sincerity is at the heart of prayer—and faith.
But in our faith, sincerity includes all the parts of us as people. Inside and out.
I’ve tried to teach the boys that just because you meet the minimum standard for something doesn’t mean you’ve mastered it—just that you’ve started on it. For example, when a Muslim realizes a certain amount of wealth, she must give certain kinds of charity. To give that is the floor, not the ceiling. You don’t on that measure alone become generous, but at least you have a floor by which to ascend from, a marker to measure yourself by, an external standard that can’t be fudged or manipulated.
Mechanically praying five times a day doesn’t make you pious alone—not by a long shot; it’s not sufficient, in other words, but it is necessary.
Religion should have boundaries that discourage our ego, or the environment we live in, from allowing us to believe whatever is convenient for us (and potentially harmful to others)—as well as boundaries that prevent us from falling into extremism. Just as there is such a thing as giving too little, there is such a thing as giving too much, say if it means neglecting our obligations to ourselves and our families. What might seem like a little thing actually becomes a really important marker to help us.
To center us—to bring us back to the middle.
II. You’re a Person, Flesh and Bones, Feelings and a Soul
It’s really important to understand that, in the Islamic tradition, we are whole people. In fact I’m writing my next book about this: our five daily prayers require us to align where we are, when we are, and how we are, to know our location in time and space, in relation to the sun and the moon and the stars around us, and then to bring our bodies, hearts, souls, and minds in alignment, before we can worship God. In order to worship God. Yes, part of prayer is asking God for what we need.
But as Dr. Abdallah Rothman makes clear, faith is not about transactions but transformations. Prayer is about adoring, revering, honoring, and serving God. Of course, God is not a Father or a Son, a man or a woman, a Person or a corporeal Being of any kind, and so we worship Him as He instructed, not in the ways we’d want to. Kids get this instinctively. We think little of meeting uniform requirements for sports; even as we know the uniform is one small part of the game, we also get that it shows respect for and symbolizes our commitment to our part in the game.
We also know that when it comes time for birthday presents, we ask people what they want. (Unless you know someone really well, and guess, but even guessing is based on what they want, not what you want.)
In what other part of life do we come before someone we revere, adore, and who we owe everything to, in the way we want (and not the way they instruct)? The so-called little things remind us that we are whole people, not just an inside with an incidental outside, and not just a flesh and blood body with no spiritual component, but a union of the two. In a time when people feel disconnected from nature, and each other, the ways in which Islam encourages faith communally, and builds faith through physical practices, are incredibly meaningful.
And unique. And even more valuable.
How can you submit to God on the inside if you can’t submit to God on the outside? Again, we are speaking of floors—where faith begins, where virtue is first cultivated. We submit to God physically in order to submit to God spiritually, but we never leave off either one, because after all we are never just spiritual beings or just physical beings. And we do it day in and day out because the more important a thing is, the more you have to commit to it. Like faith, but not only faith.
III. What We Do is Who We Are
It’s a good habit to encourage kids to ask who they’d like to become. For while it’s important to note who we are, it’s just as important—if not even more important—to think about who we’d like to turn into. And then what follows next is how we get there. While many of our plans can be upended, God rewards sincere faith and sincere intention; as long as we wanted God, and worked for good, that’s what matters. And when we do that, over and over again, we become certain kinds of people.
So-called small things seem small when you look at them in isolation. But if you do them day in and day out, you become someone else. Who do you want to be in five years? How do you want to die? How do you want God to see you? How do you want your family to remember you? Deeds add up. Discipline creates character. Character defines us. We become what we repeatedly do. We become who we make an effort to be. Generosity with our money becomes generosity more generally.
Making a small donation every day, for example, makes us very different after a few months. If we smile one day at someone new in the community, that’s great. But if we went out of our way to be nice to one person every day for a lot of days? That would change who we are. There’s a lot of focus these days on identity. On where we came from. But I prefer to think that Islam asks us rather to focus on who we’d like to be.
Islam is a way of defining and refining ourselves. Islam is about, as the beloved Messenger (S) said, perfecting good character. And how else do we get good character except by doing good, and doing it consistently? If you want to be pious, it would be weird if you rushed through each prayer and performed it as sloppily as you could, skipped a whole bunch, and then came back to it when it was convenient for you.
If you want to be smart, it’d be strange if you skimmed a few books, fell asleep during classes, and ignored opportunities to sit with remarkable people. The attitude we take to the little things becomes the attitude we express with the big things. If I focus so much on my clothes because I want to impress others, then I become dependent on them, and then I begin to orient my life around them, and then that becomes who I am, and even why I am, and certainly how I am. If I want to focus on God, then wouldn’t it make sense for most of my daily life, which is probably full of apparently small, apparently ordinary (but actually really heroic) acts that can give us chances to be reminded of God, to keep ourselves in a certain frame of mind (and heart)?
These are tough, long, involved conversations, which we should turn on ourselves too; they’re good to have and keep having. A religious person is someone who thinks about the future. Reflects on herself. And is open and honest about the desire to grow.
That’s why, once we finish The Autobiography of Malcolm X in a few weeks’ time (God willing), we’ll turn to a book about Palestine—and when Ramadan rolls around, I am strongly thinking of assigning chapters from a book on spirituality. Including the tough topics, that we need to talk to kids about; at the moment, I’m strongly leaning towards assigning On the Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, the final portion of Imam al-Ghazali’s magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences.
I’m certainly not one who believes in a fear-based Islam. But I also know that if we don’t help older students talk about life and death, to find meaning in the fact of our mortality, and be comfortable with what comes next, we are ultimately failing them. They can handle it. They need it. And by studying and teaching it, we push ourselves to reckon with it, too. Because when you realize life is limited, you realize that you have to have priorities. You have to choose. You cannot be young forever.
You cannot put off choices forever. So how do you make good choices? How do you decide what matters and what doesn’t matter as much? One way to help kids understand that is to understand how we ourselves do. The choices we made, the options we took, the directions we moved in—being honest about what we gave up, what we gained, and why that matters. If we confuse most of our lives with minor details, we might think we ourselves are minor details.
In subsequent installments, I’ll continue to build on the above, the ways in which faith done right, and thoughtfully, and reasonably, can help give us a strong sense of individuality and of agency, that can channel our natural human anxiety, help us build a sense of control in our lives, and give us strength in tough times.