Evaluating prayer, giving and the categories of action

Overview

Recall questions on salah as mere piety, the standing of Jummah, support for the poor, Hajj as a personal journey, and the five categories as a modern guide.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Give the case that prayer in Islam is simply an act of piety.

   Model answer

   Salah is commanded by God and owed to Him regardless of any benefit, its words are fixed praise rather than requests, and Muslims perform it whether or not they feel anything, so the act is worship for its own sake.

2. 2

   What is argued against reducing Muslim prayer to an act of piety?

   Model answer

   Prayer is also claimed to restrain wrongdoing, it structures the whole day and imposes discipline, congregational prayer creates and maintains community, and du'a is genuinely a request for help, so its effects reach well beyond devotion.

3. 3

   Present the case that Jummah is the most important prayer of all.

   Model answer

   It is the prayer to which the Qur'an directly summons believers to gather (62:9), most Sunni schools treat attendance as obligatory for adult men, it carries a sermon that teaches the community, and it gathers a scattered ummah weekly into one visible body.

4. 4

   What can be argued against giving Jummah first place among prayers?

   Model answer

   It replaces one obligatory Zuhr rather than adding a new duty, the five daily prayers are required of every Muslim every day, some traditions treat the dawn and night prayers as the hardest and most valued, and women are not obliged to attend Jummah at all.

5. 5

   Give the case that Islam is fundamentally built on support for the poor.

   Model answer

   One of the five pillars is a compulsory transfer of wealth, interest is forbidden, charity expiates sin, the earliest Makkan revelations attack neglect of the orphan and the destitute, and the fast is explicitly linked to feeling what the hungry feel.

6. 6

   What weakens the claim that support for the poor is the basis of Islam?

   Model answer

   Critics reply that the foundation of Islam is tawhid and worship rather than social welfare, that zakah at 2.5% is a modest levy which leaves great inequality untouched, and that the practice of Muslim states has often fallen far short of the teaching.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.