What Do Muslims Pray For? from Planck's Constant

Some public schools and universities are granting Muslim requests for prayer times, prayer rooms and ritual foot baths, prompting a debate on whether Islam is being given preferential treatment over other religions.

The University of Michigan at Dearborn is planning to build foot baths for Muslim students who wash their feet before prayer. An elementary school in San Diego created an extra recess period for Muslim pupils to pray.

The excuse offered by advocates is that schools already accommodate Jews by exempting them from taking tests on religious holidays and Christians by giving them days off on Christian holidays. However, giving a group a day off or another day to take a test which costs nearly zero to the school system is not the same as building foot baths with public moneys.

Jews are commanded to pray three times a day (with additional prayers on the Sabbath and most Jewish holidays; women need only pray once a day). Christians are told to "pray without ceasing." The Muslim faithful are commanded to pray five times a day. Most of us, even atheists, have some idea of what Christians and Jews pray for: to strengthen our moral resolve, to assuage grief or pain, for inspiration, to thank God for some blessing, for health, for happiness, for success, for birth, for death, for many things. Sometimes it's not for any particular thing but to merely share with the Divine our hopes, frustrations, worries, or fears. It can be as simple a thing as merely letting God know we adore Him.

One can spend all day in a New York office building or school and never notice Christians or Jews praying. Whenever they do it, it seems to be unobtrusive and personal. However, when Muslims pray, they need, require, no, they demand, a prayer room.

Whatever we are told here in America about Muslims absolutely needing a specific prayer room is, to be blunt, a lie. All over the rest of the world, Muslims pray wherever they want. It is only in the West that they require four walls and clean floors.

In the following photo we discover the answer to two questions: can Muslims pray without being in a prayer room, and what do Muslims pray for five times a day, day in and day out?

It is with no small amount of embarrassment that I find out that this group of Muslims seems to be praying for the very exact thing that I pray for every day: attractive young women scantily clad in lacy underwear.