Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice.

• Author: Powers, Paul
• Position: Book review

Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice. By MARION HOLMES KATZ. Themes in Islamic History, vol. 6. New York: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013. Pp. ix + 243. S85 (cloth); S29.99 (paper); S24 (ebook).

In this rich, engaging, and illuminating book, Marion Holmes Katz attempts, and largely achieves, something remarkable. Many books carelessly promise to deal with this or that phenomenon "in Islam," and this books title frames its topic in similarly vast and potentially vague terms. Remarkably, Katz actually delivers something akin to a comprehensive treatment of prayer in the whole of Islamic thought and practice. This is simultaneously the book's signal achievement and one of its few potentially limiting factors.

The book comprises an introduction, five chapters, and a brief conclusion. The introduction frames the book as corrective of a general tendency among contemporary American university students (and, presumably, the wider public) when exploring Muslim history and societies, to over-focus on issues of gender relations and politics on the one hand and Sufi "spirituality" (often detached from specifically Islamic contexts) on the other. Katz hopes to "direct needed attention to the practice most central both to personal faith and to the public constitution of Muslim communities" (p. 1), including its gendered, political, theological, and spiritual aspects. Western observers of Muslims at prayer have often either envied their discipline and devotion or derided their supposedly rote and mechanistic performance. Katz, whose previous work demonstrates her command of Islamic law, pledges to respect and clarify the legal (as opposed to "legalistic") aspects of prayer that complement its affective and spiritual aspects, while focusing on the historical diversity and development of prayer practices. In short, the introduction promises a holistic treatment of the topic.

The introduction and conclusion taken together offer an implicit argument, namely, that the rhythms and discipline of traditional salat have insulated many modern, observant Muslims from both secularization and Islamist radicalization. The book as a whole does not systematically pursue this, or any other, sweeping interpretive argument but tends toward the descriptive and summative. Throughout, however, Katz offers an array of smaller arguments, many of them trenchant and efficient.

Chapter one, "Canonical Prayer (salat) and Supplication (du'a'): Development and Rules," begins with the Quranic vocabulary of worship and the efforts of early Muslim philologists and lexicographers to determine the etymology of the Quranic term salat. Efforts to establish the Arabic origins of this term were equivocal, but the term as a reference to worshipful prayer practices seems to have been widely known in the Prophet's milieu, although "it was fundamentally reconfigured by the Islamic dispensation and achieved a salience that was totally new for pagan Arabs" (p. 15). Katz traces the evidence for the development over time of the specific components that came to constitute doctrinal salat, especially its...