Note 25 — Chapter XIII · CONCLUSION.

Very effective also, both in winning and retaining, is the ordinance of the daily prayers five times a day. Montesquieu25 has well said, “Une religion chargée de beaucoup de pratiques attache plus à elle qu’une autre qui l’est moins; on tient beaucoup aux choses dont on est continuellement occupé.” The religion of the Muslim is continually present with him and in the daily prayer manifests itself in a solemn and impressive ritual, which cannot leave either the worshipper or the spectator unaffected. Saʻīd b. Ḥasan, an Alexandrian Jew, who embraced Islam in the year 1298, speaks of the sight of the Friday prayer in a mosque as a determining factor in his own conversion. During a severe illness he had had a vision in which a voice bade him declare himself a Muslim. “And when I entered the mosque” (he goes on) “and saw the Muslims standing in rows like angels, I heard a voice speaking within me, ‘This is the community whose coming was announced by the prophets (on whom be blessings and peace!)’; and when the preacher came forth clad in his black robe, a deep feeling of awe fell upon me … and when he closed his sermon with the words, ‘Verily God enjoineth justice and kindness and the giving of gifts to kinsfolk, and He forbiddeth wickedness and wrong and oppression. He warneth you; haply ye will be mindful.’26 And when the prayer began, I was mightily uplifted, for the rows of the Muslims appeared to me like rows of angels, to whose prostrations and genuflections God Almighty was revealing Himself, and I heard a voice within me saying, ‘If God spake twice unto the people of Israel throughout the ages, verily He speaketh unto this community in every time of prayer,’ and I was convinced in my mind that I had been created to be a Muslim.”27