The Friday gathering at which Muslims listen to a sermon (khuṭba) and perform a set of ritual prostrations (raka‘āt) is known as ṣalāt al-jum‘a or jumu‘a (congregational prayer) within the Muslim legal tradition. The ṣalāt al-jum‘a is taken to be the reference of the Qur’anic verse, “When the call is proclaimed on the day of assembly (yawm al-jum‘a), make haste to the remembrance of God, and abandon your selling” (62:9). There is some evidence to suggest that the congregational Friday prayer ritual was derived from and in part in a mimicry of the Jewish and Christian Sabbath traditions. The manuals of jurisprudence list various elements of and conditions for the validity of Friday prayer, some of which have obvious political implications, both theoretical and practical. Furthermore, in historical terms, the establishment of Friday prayer under the auspices of, and in the name of, an individual ruler was an outward symbol of the ruler’s hegemony and, along with the minting of coinage in the ruler’s name, the most important of such symbols.
The political importance of Friday prayer is underscored by reports relating to the Prophet Muhammad’s institution of Friday prayer, indicating that it formed an element in the formation of the first Muslim community in Medina following the hijra in 622. Through the establishment of this political community, the Muslims were able to expand their empire throughout the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. A regularly cited hadith report found in the collection of Sulayman al-Tabarani (d. 970) underlines the role of Friday prayer in political community formation: “Whoever abandons al-jum‘a when having either a just or an unjust Imam, will have no [valid] prayer, fasting, alms or pilgrimage.” Failure to perform Friday prayer in a Muslim state context puts at risk the validity of all of one’s other religious duties and ultimately excludes the individual from community membership.
The development of law concerning the legitimate and illegitimate performance of Friday prayer became a cipher for political theory among some jurists. That the leader of the Friday prayers, the imām al-jum‘a, should be appointed by the ruler, termed variously sultan, imam, or wālī in the legal literature, is a widely accepted position. The view is based on the notion that one should not lead prayers in another’s home without the owner’s permission. It was particularly promoted within the Hanafi school, which was founded by the great eighth-century jurist Abu Hanifa (d. 767) and later dominated the Muslim world through its official standing in both the Mughal and Ottoman empires. Similarly, there was a prevalent view that there can only be a single Friday prayer in any city. In this way, this weekly occasion became an opportunity for creating and enforcing political cohesion, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that caliphs and sultans used it for precisely this purpose.
Before the Friday prayer prostrations, there was a period reserved for a sermon, or rather two sermons, with a short break between them. The historical sources describe how it had become accepted practice for the preacher (khaṭīb) to mention the name of and utter a blessing for the current ruler as an element of the khuṭba. This element is not universally replicated in the works of Islamic law. When jurists do mention the blessing for the sultan, they do not make it obligatory for the valid performance of the prayer. This failure, or perhaps refusal, to stipulate, in an explicit manner, that the blessing for the sultan must be part of the Friday prayer should not be seen as an act of open rebellion by the jurists. Rather, it reflects the general juristic tendency, particularly in ritual law such as prayer, of the individual and the necessary conditions for his or her effective performance of a duty demanded by God. In any case, as some hadiths of the Prophet’s Companions indicate, the blessing for the sultan was an innovation, introduced into the practice after the life of Muhammad: if the prayer for the preservation of the ruler was an essential element of the khuṭba, the Prophet would have had to pray for himself in the third person—a strange practice for which no evidence exists.
In the Imami Shi‘i tradition, the legal status of the Friday prayer was the subject of great controversy. The common understanding among the jurists, both Sunni and Shi‘i, was that a legitimate ruler had to give his permission before a valid Friday prayer could be held in a city, but Imami jurisprudence upheld a theoretical commitment to the idea that all governments other than that led by the rightful imam were illegitimate. The Twelfth Imam of the Imami Shi‘is had been incognito since 870 and hence was unavailable to provide the essential validating decree. For some Imami jurists, this meant that Friday prayer had lapsed during the period of the imam’s concealment (ghayba), and holding Friday prayer was, therefore, forbidden until he revealed himself. The debate around the legitimacy of Friday prayer in later Imami jurisprudence became intricate and politically charged, particularly when the presence of a “just jurist” (faqīh ‘ādil) was introduced by some jurists as a legitimating element. During the Safavid period, some jurists argued that Friday prayer could become “optionally” obligatory (wājib takhyīrī, i.e., one can perform it or one can perform the usual noon prayers instead, but one must perform one of the two) through the activating presence of the just jurist, who could substitute for the imam. The Safavid state officially supported this view, appointing an imām-i jum‘a to each city as the Friday prayer leader. The move was controversial and provoked a series of rebuttals and counterrebuttals in a debate that continued into the 21st century.
The importance of the Friday prayer event as a political tool within Muslim societies is obvious. Through the khuṭba, the objectives of the government’s religious policy can be made known, as they have been in modern-day Saudi Arabia. The khuṭba can also function as a conduit for revolutionary propaganda as it did in the months leading up to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini’s Friday sermons from Najaf in Iraq, and then later from Paris, were smuggled into Iran on cassette tapes. The holding of a communal congregational prayer has, unavoidably, proven to be of great political possibilities, both in terms of its formal requirements and in its potential as a vehicle for social mobilization.
See also Pillars of Islam
Further Reading
Norman Calder, “Friday Prayer and the Juristic Theory of Government: Sarakhsī, Shīrāzī, Māwardī,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 49, no. 1 (1986); Andrew J. Newman, “Fayd al-Kashani and the Rejection of the Clergy/State Alliance: Friday Prayer as Politics in the Safavid Period,” in The Most Learned of the Shi’a, The Institution of the Marja’ Taqlid, edited by Linda Walbridge, 2001; Haggay Ram, Myth and Mobilization in Revolutionary Iran: The Use of the Friday Congregational Sermon, 1994.
ROBERT GLEAVE