Introductory Remarks on Baha'i Obligatory Prayer

I'm planning on beginning the essay with a thesis paragraph in which I immediately summarize everthing that I intend to argue. Following that will be these paragraphs. This isn't terribly heady stuff. Most of it is intended for a non-Baha'i audience who doesn't already know the mechanics of Baha'i obligatory prayer. The last paragraph though is intended to replace the first paragraph from the Saturday post entitled "the Place of Human Unity in Obligatory Prayer." It can be thought of as an Islamic/Baha'i challenge to the individualism and internalism of contemporary Western spirituality.



The question guiding this essay is as follows. What does the Bahá’i Long Obligatory Prayer ask of God? And likewise, what does it asks of the one who performs it? While on the one hand the prayer is a petition and testimony offered up to God by the performer, it has on the other hand a standardized text written by Bahá’u’lláh. There is no doubt that it was written with the understanding that it would be performed innumerable times in a person’s lifetime. With this in mind, it is more than reasonable to argue that Bahá’u’lláh intends for the prayer to produce in the performer the spiritual desires that it invokes. In other words, the prayer is a means by which the performer develops desires best suited for Bahá’i spiritual quest.

At no point is a Baha’i required to perform the Long Obligatory Prayer. But all Baha’is are required to perform obligatory prayer. And for that there are three prayers from which to choose, the Short, the Medium, and the Long. Thus, anyone who gets in the habit of praying the Long will most likely perform it an enormous number of times, even though he or she may alternate between other options. The names by which the different obligatory prayers are distinguished are no misnomers. The Short weighs in at 51 words and is to be said once between noon and sundown. The Medium is 490 words. It is said three times in the day, once each between dawn and noon, noon and sundown, sundown and midnight. The Long is a sprawling 1590 words and is said once in the course of 24 hours. The Long Obligatory Prayer consists of 14 different passages ranging in length from one sentence to seven. Each section is divided up by a change in posture. Throughout the course of the prayer the performer is instructed to adopt such postures as kneeling, standing with hands raised in supplication, prostration with forehead against the floor, bowing at the waist and others. In this way, the prayer employs body language in addition to verbal language as part of its performance.

Another question that has guided this essay is this: What would happen to the way we think about prayer if we regarded its influence as at least as much public and external as it is private and internal? One reason I ask this is because the Long Obligatory prayer is not just any prayer. It is one of three whose performance are mandated upon entrance into a faith community. In this way, daily obligatory prayer is closely tied into Bahá’i identity. Obligatory prayers should be expected then to contain certain features whose purpose is to build up this faith community. Although obligatory prayer can only be said in private (a deliberate rejection of Islamic tradition) the public life of the soul is an ever present concern. One is never alone when one prays. For the private life of the soul necessarily concerns the way that we interact with people outside of private space.