Students from any culture or religion are invited to the Juma prayer today at 1 p.m. in the Cultural Center.

The prayer is an Islamic tradition and takes place every Friday.

“Muslims pray five times a day, everyday, but on Friday’s our afternoon prayer is replaced with a centralized prayer,” said Shaukat Sheikh, a second year graduate student for communication studies and technology.

Within the religion, they pray at dawn, afternoon, midday, evening and night.

However, on Friday the regular afternoon prayer does not occur.

“Everyone makes a bigger effort to come and attend the community prayer,” Sheikh said. “Its an opportunity to get together and centralize.”

Before prayer, Muslims wudoo, which is a cleaning up process.

“For every prayer we stay clean,” Sheikh said. “We go to clean up, we wash our hands, nose, head, mouth, arms and feet.”

After the wudoo, a call for prayer is done called the Adhan and the prayer begins.

Islamic prayers are completed in units called rakats.

While the different prayers have different numbers of rakats, the Juma consists of two.

After the rakats, one educates everyone with a sermon, or a khutba.

“The Koran is used in comparison with the Hadith during the sermon,” Sheikh said.

The Hadith is a set of books filled with narrations of Muhammad, the Islamic prophet.

It is an important tool for understanding the Koran, Sheikh said.

The prayer is ended with a Dua.

“In the Dua, we ask for things, such as peace,” Sheikh said.

Classes and individuals are invited to observe the prayer; however, if a class would like to come, prior contact is requested.

“We want to enable people to understand what we want and what we have,” Sheikh said.

“Knowledge creates a better cultural understanding to let everybody come see what we do and to learn.”

Kayleigh Zyskowski can be reached at 581-7942

or kzyskowski@eiu.edu.

Free mock cocktails, snacks and a comedy show are on the agenda for the 7th Street Underground in the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union tonight.

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