I want to know how the Quran talks about Salah. I’ve been accustomed to speak of Salah exclusively as a ritualized memorized recitation of the Quran punctuated by cycles of bowing and prostrating. However, the language of the Quran – the Quranic idiolect – envisions Salah very differently than we do in our new post-Quranic vernacular. The ritualized Salah was not the genesis of Salah; the Quran did not coin the term, rather it recasts it and invites me to reimagine each phenomenon of Salah in the world around me differently than I’ve been accustomed.

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