Five Pillars of Islam (Arkan al-Islam)

The Five Pillars of Islam (Arabic: أركان الإسلام, arkan al-Islam) are the five obligatory acts that constitute the practice of the religion: the declaration of faith (shahada), the five daily prayers (salah), the obligatory alms (zakat), the fast of Ramadan (sawm), and the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) for those able to undertake it. They are named together in two reports transmitted in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, and they have been treated as the framework of Muslim obligation by every school of Islamic law.

The Textual Basis of the Pillars

The Hadith of Gabriel

The five practices are set out together in the hadith known as the Hadith of Gabriel, transmitted in Sahih Muslim 8 on the authority of Umar ibn al-Khattab and in Sahih al-Bukhari 50 on the authority of Abu Hurayrah. A man whom the Companions did not recognise came to the Prophet and questioned him in turn about Islam, faith (iman), and excellence (ihsan); after he departed, the Prophet identified him as Gabriel, come to teach them their religion.

Asked what Islam is, the Prophet's answer named the five: to testify that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, to perform the prayers, to pay the zakat, to fast in Ramadan, and to make the pilgrimage to the House for one able to do so.

Two features of this report shape how the pillars are understood. The first is that the five are given as the answer to a specific question — what Islam is — and are distinguished within the same conversation from iman, the articles of belief, and from ihsan, the quality with which worship is performed. The pillars are therefore the outward acts of the religion rather than the whole of it, and the scholarly tradition has consistently treated them that way. The second is that a parallel report describes Islam as built upon five things. That is the source of the architectural metaphor from which the pillars take their name.

"Islam Is Built Upon Five"

The second report is narrated by Abdullah ibn Umar and is the source of the word "pillars." Its wording is that Islam is built upon five: the testimony that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, the establishment of the prayer, the giving of the zakat, the pilgrimage to the House, and the fast of Ramadan (Sahih al-Bukhari 8; Sahih Muslim 16; also Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2609 and Sunan an-Nasa'i 5001, both graded sahih).

The order of the last two items varies between transmissions, and Ibn Umar was asked directly about it: whether the pilgrimage or the fast came first. His answer was that the fast of Ramadan precedes the pilgrimage (Sahih Muslim 16). The variation is one of sequence in the wording rather than of substance, and the jurists have not read it as establishing any ranking of obligation between the two.

One clarification is needed because the two reports are often conflated, including in reference works. Bukhari 8 is the "built upon five" report of Ibn Umar. The Hadith of Gabriel is a separate report at Bukhari 50 and Muslim 8. Both name the same five practices; they are not the same hadith.

The Sequence Given to Mu'adh

A third report shows the five being taught in practice rather than enumerated in the abstract, and it establishes an order of priority in instruction. When the Prophet sent Mu'adh ibn Jabal to Yemen he told him that he was going to a people of the Book, and that the first thing he should call them to was the worship of God alone and the acknowledgement that Muhammad is His Messenger. If they accepted that, he was to inform them that God had made five prayers obligatory upon them in each day and night. If they accepted that, he was to inform them that God had made obligatory a charity upon their wealth, to be taken from the rich among them and returned to the poor among them.

The instruction closes with two cautions: that Mu'adh should not take the choicest of their property as zakat, and that he should beware the supplication of the wronged, for there is no barrier between it and God (Sahih al-Bukhari 1395; Sahih al-Bukhari 1458; Sahih al-Bukhari 1496; Sahih Muslim 19; also Jami' at-Tirmidhi 625, Sunan an-Nasa'i 2522 and Sunan Abu Dawud 1584, all graded sahih).

Three things in this report have shaped Islamic practice well beyond the mission to Yemen. Belief is established before ritual, and ritual before financial obligation — a graduated sequence that the jurists cite on the teaching of converts. The purpose of zakat is stated in the text itself as a transfer from the wealthy of a community to its poor, which is why it has always been treated as a matter of public entitlement rather than private generosity. And the officer collecting it is placed under restraint, warned against both over-collection and injustice.

What the Five Address

The five obligations are distributed across the dimensions of a life rather than concentrated in one. The shahada is a statement of belief, requiring nothing but conviction and utterance. Prayer is a bodily discipline repeated five times daily. Zakat is a transfer of property, and so a social and economic obligation as much as a devotional one. The fast occupies a month of each year and is undertaken by an entire community at the same time. The pilgrimage is a journey, performed once if at all, and conditional on having the means to make it.

The range is deliberate: obligations that recur daily, annually, and once in a lifetime; some discharged privately and others only in company; some costing nothing and others a substantial portion of accumulated wealth. Classical writers on worship observed that this distribution means no single temperament or circumstance is favoured, since the pillars cannot be satisfied by contemplation alone, by giving alone, or by physical observance alone.

First Pillar: Shahada, the Declaration of Faith

The shahada is the sentence la ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun rasul Allah — there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God. Its sincere utterance is what makes a person a Muslim, and it is repeated within every call to prayer and every prayer, so that no practising Muslim goes a day without pronouncing it.

The sentence has two clauses and each does distinct work. The first, la ilaha illa Allah, is constructed as a negation followed by an exception: it denies divinity to everything before affirming it of God alone. Classical theologians have made much of that order, since it means the statement is not simply the assertion that God exists but the rejection of every rival object of worship — the doctrine the Quran calls tawhid, and whose violation it calls shirk, the associating of partners with God. The second clause, Muhammadun rasul Allah, adds the acknowledgement of a specific prophet, and with it the acceptance of his message as binding and of his practice as the pattern for how the remaining pillars are performed. Without the second clause the first would be a statement of general monotheism; with it, the statement becomes specifically Islamic.

The Quran states the substance of the first clause directly — "know that there is no deity except God" (Quran 47:19) — though the shahada as a formula, in the two-clause wording, comes from the practice of the Prophet and the Companions rather than from a single verse.

Later scholarship elaborated a set of conditions (shurut) under which the declaration is held to be meaningful rather than merely spoken. They are conventionally given as seven: knowledge of what the words mean; certainty rather than doubt; acceptance of what follows from them; submission in the sense of acting accordingly; truthfulness, as against the declaration of the hypocrite; sincerity of intention, directed to God rather than to any audience; and love for what the statement affirms. This enumeration is the work of the theologians and jurists rather than a list found in a single hadith, and it is presented here as such. Its purpose is diagnostic: it distinguishes the declaration of a believer from the same words uttered without conviction, a distinction the Quran itself draws repeatedly in its passages on the hypocrites of Medina.

In practical terms the shahada is the point of entry into Islam. It requires no officiant and no ceremony, though witnesses are customary; and no formal instruction is a precondition, which is consistent with the sequence the Prophet gave Mu'adh, where instruction in the other obligations follows acceptance rather than preceding it.

Second Pillar: Salah, the Prayer

The five daily prayers are the most frequent of the obligations and the one that most visibly structures a Muslim day. That there are five, performed within each day and night, is established in the instruction to Mu'adh (Sahih al-Bukhari 1395) and is a point on which no school has ever differed. The Quran commands the prayer repeatedly, often paired with the zakat — "establish the prayer and give the zakat" (Quran 2:43) — and opens its description of the successful believers with those who are humble in their prayer (Quran 23:1–2).

The Five Prayers and Their Times

The prayers are fajr before sunrise, zuhr after the sun passes its zenith, asr in the afternoon, maghrib just after sunset, and isha at night. Each has a window rather than a moment, defined by the position of the sun rather than by the clock, which is why prayer timetables differ by latitude and season and why the intervals are uneven. The number of obligatory cycles (rak'at) is two for fajr, four for zuhr and asr, three for maghrib, and four for isha.

The structure of a cycle is standard: standing with recitation from the Quran, beginning with the opening chapter; bowing; two prostrations separated by a sitting; and a concluding sitting with the salutation. Ritual purity is a precondition, achieved by ablution (wudu) or, where water is unavailable or its use harmful, by the dry substitute (tayammum). Prayer is performed facing the Kaaba in Mecca, the direction known as the qibla.

Concession and Congregation

The law surrounding prayer is notable for the extent of its concessions. A traveller shortens the four-cycle prayers to two, and the schools permit the joining of zuhr with asr and of maghrib with isha in defined circumstances. Illness alters the posture rather than excusing the prayer: one who cannot stand prays seated, and one who cannot sit prays lying down. These allowances are not marginal technicalities but a structural feature, and the jurists derived from them a general principle that the obligation adapts to capacity rather than lapsing when capacity fails.

Congregational prayer carries greater merit than solitary prayer in the assessment of all the schools, and the Friday midday prayer (jumu'ah), which includes a sermon, is a distinct obligation on adult men in most juristic positions. The consequence has been architectural and social: the mosque exists because the prayer is communal, and the rhythm of five daily gatherings has shaped the layout of Muslim towns for fourteen centuries.

Third Pillar: Zakat, the Obligatory Alms

Zakat is a compulsory annual transfer of a portion of qualifying wealth to specified categories of recipients. It is not charity in the discretionary sense — voluntary giving is sadaqa, a separate and unlimited category — but a due, and classical Islamic states collected it as such. The Arabic root carries the senses of growth and of purification, and the jurists have read the name as indicating that wealth is purified by the deduction rather than diminished by it.

Who Pays, and How Much

Zakat falls due on wealth that has been held for a lunar year and that exceeds a threshold (nisab). Below the threshold nothing is owed. The classical thresholds were expressed in commodities: for gold, twenty mithqal; for silver, two hundred dirhams; with separate schedules for camels, cattle, sheep and goats, and for agricultural produce. Because these are commodity measures, contemporary application requires conversion, and jurists differ over whether the gold or silver standard should govern the monetary threshold — a difference with real consequences, since the two have diverged widely in modern markets.

The rate on monetary wealth, gold and silver, and trade goods is one fortieth, two and a half per cent. Agricultural produce is assessed differently, conventionally at a tenth of the harvest where the land is watered naturally and a twentieth where irrigation involves cost and labour. Livestock follows its own graduated schedule. Mineral extraction and treasure trove are treated separately again. The variation reflects a consistent underlying logic: the rate is lower where the owner's effort and expense in producing the wealth were greater.

Who Receives

The recipients are not left to the payer's judgement. The Quran names eight categories: the poor, the destitute, those employed to administer the collection, those whose hearts are to be reconciled, those in bondage, those in debt, expenditure in the cause of God, and the traveller in need (Quran 9:60). The Prophet's instruction to Mu'adh states the principle in a single clause — taken from the rich among them and returned to the poor among them (Sahih al-Bukhari 1458).

Two consequences follow. Zakat is redistributive by design and within a community rather than in the abstract, which is why the classical jurists debated at length whether it might be transferred out of the district in which it was collected. And the payer has no claim to gratitude, because the recipient is receiving an entitlement. Al-Qaradawi's Fiqh al-Zakat, the standard modern treatment, builds its argument on precisely this point.

The Quran also links the collection of alms to the moral condition of the giver — "take from their wealth a charity by which you purify them" (Quran 9:103) — which is the basis for the tradition's insistence that zakat is an act of worship and not merely a fiscal measure.

Fourth Pillar: Sawm, the Fast of Ramadan

Fasting through the month of Ramadan is prescribed in the Quran in terms that place it in continuity with earlier communities: "O you who have believed, fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you, that you may become mindful of God" (Quran 2:183). Ramadan is the ninth month of the lunar calendar, and because the Islamic year is shorter than the solar year the month moves through the seasons over a cycle of roughly thirty-three years — so that a Muslim who lives long enough will have fasted it in every season.

What the Fast Requires

The fast runs from the first light of dawn to sunset and requires abstention from food, drink and sexual relations. It is broken by the deliberate taking of any of these; forgetful eating does not invalidate it in the majority position. A meal before dawn (suhur) and the breaking of the fast at sunset (iftar) are both established practice, and the intention to fast is a requirement, not merely the abstention itself.

The tradition is emphatic that the fast is not reducible to hunger. The reports on it consistently pair the physical abstention with restraint in speech and conduct, and the classical writers treated a fast accompanied by dishonesty or ill temper as defective in the thing it was for. Alongside the fast, the nights of Ramadan carry additional voluntary prayer (tarawih), and the month is associated with increased recitation of the Quran, which the Quran itself describes as having been sent down in it.

Exemption and Compensation

The same verse that prescribes the fast provides for those who cannot keep it, and the law that developed is detailed. The sick and the traveller make up the missed days later. Menstruating and post-partum women do not fast and make up the days afterwards. The pregnant and nursing are excused where fasting would harm mother or child, with the schools differing over whether they make up days, pay compensation, or both. Those with a permanent condition that precludes fasting altogether pay a compensation (fidya) feeding a poor person for each day instead. Children below the age of responsibility are not obliged, though they are commonly introduced to partial fasting.

The month closes with the festival of Eid al-Fitr, before which a distinct obligatory alms (zakat al-fitr) is due from each member of a household, calculated in staple food rather than money in the classical texts and intended to ensure that the poor share in the festival.

Fifth Pillar: Hajj, the Pilgrimage

The pilgrimage to Mecca is the only pillar made explicitly conditional in the Quran: "pilgrimage to the House is a duty owed to God by those people who are able to undertake it" (Quran 3:97). It is obligatory once in a lifetime on a Muslim who has the physical capacity and the means, and who can provide for dependants in his absence. A shorter visitation, the umrah, may be performed at any time of year and does not discharge the obligation.

The Rites

Hajj is performed in the month of Dhu al-Hijjah and its rites occupy several days at fixed places. The pilgrim enters a state of consecration (ihram), marked for men by two unsewn white cloths and entailing restrictions on cutting hair or nails, on perfume, on sexual relations, and on hunting. The circumambulation of the Kaaba (tawaf) is performed seven times, and the passage between the hills of Safa and Marwah (sa'y) likewise seven. The central day is the standing at Arafat on the ninth of the month, without which the pilgrimage is not valid. The night is passed at Muzdalifah; the following days at Mina involve the casting of pebbles at three pillars, an animal sacrifice, and the shaving or cutting of the hair, before a further circumambulation of the Kaaba.

The uniformity of ihram is the feature classical writers returned to most often: pilgrims of every origin and rank perform the rites in the same two pieces of cloth, and the visible erasure of distinction was read as the point rather than a by-product.

Scale and Administration

The pilgrimage has always been the largest recurring assembly in the Muslim world, and its logistics have been a concern of Muslim governments since the Umayyad period — the maintenance of the pilgrimage routes, the provision of water, and the safety of the caravans being standing obligations of whoever held Mecca. In the modern period the numbers reached a scale requiring formal management, and the Saudi authorities operate a quota system allocating places by country. The administrative history of the hajj is treated in the article on the Great Mosque of Mecca, which houses the Kaaba and around which the rites of tawaf are performed.

How the Pillars Relate to One Another

The five are not a list of separate duties but an interlocking set, and the tradition has read them together in several ways.

The shahada is presupposed by the other four, since each is an act of worship directed to the God the shahada affirms and performed in the manner the Prophet it names established. Prayer and zakat are paired in the Quran more than thirty times, so consistently that the pairing became a formula: the tradition read it as joining obligation toward God with obligation toward other people, and refused to treat either as substituting for the other. The fast and the pilgrimage both impose a temporary discipline of abstention, one in place and one in time, and both are undertaken collectively.

There is also a graduated relationship of demand. The shahada costs nothing material. Prayer costs time, repeatedly. Zakat costs property, annually. The fast costs bodily comfort for a month. The pilgrimage costs a journey and its expense, once. Al-Nawawi and other commentators on the Hadith of Gabriel observed that the sequence in which the Prophet named them tracks this increase, and that the report to Mu'adh follows the same order in instruction.

Juristic Difference on the Pillars

The five pillars themselves are not disputed. Differences among the schools concern their performance, and they are mostly narrow.

On prayer, the four Sunni schools differ over details of posture, the placement of the hands, the audibility of certain recitations, and the precise boundaries of the time windows — the beginning of asr being the best-known instance. Twelver Shia practice permits the joining of zuhr with asr and of maghrib with isha more broadly than the Sunni schools do, so that the five prayers are commonly performed at three occasions; the number of prayers is not in question, only their distribution across the day.

On zakat, differences concern which categories of wealth are assessable and how the thresholds convert into modern money. Whether the zakat on trade goods is calculated on stock or on profit, and whether shares, pensions and receivables are assessable, are live questions in contemporary juristic writing rather than settled ones.

On fasting, the schools differ over what compensation is owed by the pregnant and nursing, and over the treatment of the deliberately broken fast. A more consequential modern difference concerns the determination of the month: whether the new moon must be sighted locally, whether a sighting anywhere binds Muslims everywhere, and whether astronomical calculation may establish it. This is why the start of Ramadan is not always observed on the same day in different countries.

On hajj, the schools differ over the permissible forms of the pilgrimage and over the details of certain rites, and jurists have addressed at length the position of a pilgrim who is prevented from completing the rites or who omits one.

These differences are the ordinary product of a legal tradition applying transmitted texts to varied circumstances, and they were not generally treated as questions of orthodoxy by the classical jurists themselves.

Historical Development

The five obligations were not imposed at once. The shahada is coextensive with the mission itself. Prayer belongs to the Meccan period, though the settled form of five daily prayers is associated in the sources with the later Meccan years. Zakat, the fast of Ramadan and the pilgrimage all took their obligatory form in Medina, where a community with property, a calendar and eventually control of Mecca existed to make them practicable. The Quranic verse prescribing the fast (Quran 2:183) is Medinan, and the Prophet performed the pilgrimage in its Islamic form once, in the final year of his life.

The identification of exactly these five as the pillars is a consequence of the two hadith rather than of a Quranic list, which is why the classical works of fiqh organise their chapters on worship around them and why the phrase itself entered general Muslim usage so early. The subsequent history of each is largely the history of Islamic law: the elaboration of prayer times and postures, the working out of zakat schedules for new forms of wealth, the accumulated jurisprudence on fasting and travel, and the administrative history of the pilgrimage.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Quran 2:43 — "And establish prayer and give zakat and bow with those who bow," one of more than thirty places pairing the two obligations
• Quran 2:183 — "O you who have believed, fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you," the prescription of the fast, with the exemptions following in 2:184–185
• Quran 3:97 — "And pilgrimage to the House is a duty owed to God by those people who are able to undertake it," the conditional form of the hajj obligation
• Quran 9:60 — the eight categories of zakat recipients
• Quran 9:103 — "Take from their wealth a charity by which you purify them"
• Quran 23:1–2 — the successful believers, described first as those humble in their prayer
• Quran 47:19 — "So know that there is no deity except God"
• Sahih al-Bukhari 8; Sahih Muslim 16 — Ibn Umar: "Islam is built upon five." Also Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2609 and Sunan an-Nasa'i 5001, both graded sahih. Sahih Muslim 16 additionally records Ibn Umar being asked whether the pilgrimage or the fast comes first, and answering that the fast precedes it
• Sahih Muslim 8; Sahih al-Bukhari 50 — the Hadith of Gabriel, in which the five are given as the answer to the question what Islam is, and are distinguished from iman and ihsan. This is a different report from Bukhari 8, with which it is frequently confused
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1395, 1458, 1496, 4347, 7372; Sahih Muslim 19 — the instruction to Mu'adh ibn Jabal on his mission to Yemen: belief first, then the five daily prayers, then a charity taken from the rich of a community and returned to its poor, with the cautions against taking the choicest property and against the supplication of the wronged. Also Jami' at-Tirmidhi 625, Sunan an-Nasa'i 2435 and 2522, Sunan Abu Dawud 1584 and Sunan Ibn Majah 1783, all graded sahih

Classical Islamic Sources

• Al-Nawawi, Yahya ibn Sharaf. Sharh al-Nawawi ala Sahih Muslim. Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath al-Arabi, 1972. [Original c. 1277 CE] — the standard commentary on the Hadith of Gabriel and on the relation of Islam, iman and ihsan
• Ibn Qudama, Muwaffaq al-Din. Al-Mughni. Riyadh: Maktabat al-Riyadh al-Haditha, 1981. [Original c. 1223 CE] — comprehensive Hanbali jurisprudence covering all five pillars, and a principal source for the comparative positions of the schools
• Al-Shafi'i, Muhammad ibn Idris. Kitab al-Umm. Beirut: Dar al-Ma'rifah, 1990. [Original c. 820 CE]
• Ibn Rushd, Abu al-Walid. Bidayat al-Mujtahid wa Nihayat al-Muqtasid. Translated by Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee as The Distinguished Jurist's Primer. Reading: Garnet, 1994–96. [Original c. 1188 CE] — the classical comparative treatment of juristic difference on worship

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Esposito, John L. Islam: The Straight Path. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Peters, Francis E. The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Wensinck, A.J. "Shahada." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Vol. 9. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
• Paret, Rudi. "Salat." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Vol. 8. Leiden: Brill, 1995.
• Lecker, Michael. "Zakat." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Vol. 11. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

Further Reading

• Al-Qaradawi, Yusuf. Fiqh al-Zakat. Translated by Monzer Kahf. London: Dar al-Taqwa, 1999. — the standard modern treatment, and the principal reference for the application of zakat to contemporary forms of wealth
• Rippin, Andrew. Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2012.
• Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization. New York: HarperOne, 2003.