Prayer as Boundary Making in Early Islam
Who one prayed behind mattered in early Islam. Being selective about one’s prayer leader (imām) when part of a congregational prayer reflected a desire to ensure one’s prayer was accepted by relying on an individual whose religious and societal probity could be depended upon, but it was also a way of demarcating communal boundaries as part of the larger debates taking place over orthodoxy and orthopraxy during the first two centuries of Islam. In this presentation, I examine legal positions ascribed to early legists as a window into how these debates were manifested on a practical level through mechanisms such as prayer. Najam Haider has previously demonstrated how various elements of prayer such as the invocation (qunūt) and the utterance of the basmala out loud were used as identity markers in early Islam. Building upon this, I focus on the discussions ascribed to early legists about what one should do when faced with the prospect of praying behind someone whose beliefs were in conflict with one’s own. That legists across communal affiliations during this period repeatedly brought up those one should not pray behind is, I will argue, an indication that this was one of the ‘rules of the game’ for how one demarcated boundaries between oneself and other communal groups at this time.
Adam Ramadhan
PhD Candidate
Universiteit Leiden
Adam Ramadhan is a PhD candidate at Leiden University as part the ERC Horizon STG Project ‘Embodied Imamate: Mapping the Development of the Early Shiʿi Community 700-900 CE.’ He previously studied at the universities of Leeds and Oxford and spent several years in the Shiʿi seminary (ḥawza) at Al-Mahdi Institute. He works on the social and intellectual history of early Shiʿism and on Islamic legal studies.