Distractions of Prayer
Written by: Hamzah Moin You ever felt like you were totally in the zone for a prayer when something out of your control totally screws it all up? Sometimes in order to be pro-active we just have to simply avoid the external DISTRACTIONS OF PRAYER. Avoid 'em.
The Scratcher
Sometimes I unfortunately get paired with extremely annoying people beside me in prayer. Sometimes they slyly check their wristwatch and start winding it. Other people breathe so loud that it’s difficult to hear the Imam’s recitation. But the worst person to have beside you is the Scratcher.
From the moment the prayer starts with the Takbir to the second it ends, this dude will scratch every single part of his body. He will even scratch parts that I didn’t even know existed on human bodies. Once I think he got to the point where he was scratching the itches on MY body. Things got really makrooh, really fast.
If you got a huge itching problem then you might have fleas and in which case, you should go to the veterinarian right away.
Daycare
Some folks who lack the proper parenting skills feel that they need a nice cozy night at the mosque to cool some sins off. I mean, masjids are great for families right? We can even bring wee ones so they can frolic in the house of God and exchange pacifiers and Hot Wheels and Barbies right? But what ends up happening? We just dump the brats in some random room and pray a perfect baby-interruption-free prayer.
But where’s the only place that the babies end up being dumped to?
I never understood why parents don’t simply just suck it up and get a babysitter for a night if they want to enjoy a night out at the mosque. Sure, the kids should be exposed to the masjid but not by screwing up everyone else’s prayers because their parents don’t know how to say “Shut up and sit down” or “Put that diaper back on” in public.
Or newer masjids can at least start making separate rooms for babies to run amok. An all-baby zone. Like McDonald’s playland but instead of running away from the scary Hamburglar the kids would run away from the scary jinns and instead of babies sliding into a ball pit they can slide into date pits.
Unnecessary Repeater
Some masjids cut things like audio systems because all the khateebs at the mosque scream at the top of their lungs while delivering a khutbah. This poses a problem during prayer however and sisters or late lateefs in the back find it tough to hear. That’s when a Repeater has to step up. The Repeater has one purpose: to make sure people in the back can hear the Imam.
Sometimes the Repeater gets carried away with his job and does the ‘repeating’ for EVERY prayer. Even when the Imam is LOUDER than the Repeater. Or even when there are only three people in the prayer.
Music to my ears.
Shirts-With-Essays-On-The-Back
People wear some of the dumbest things to the masjid. Some weird kid once wore a shirt that said “I like to do it all night long” on it and instead of being chastised by the uncles, they praised him for wearing a shirt that was referring to prayer and encouraged other youth to pray all night long as well.
Other shirts however, have huge essays written on the back. So huge that it takes a few rakaats to read it all. And why are you reading it in the first place? Terrible.
The shirt was probably designed by the enemies of Islam to distract you from prayer.
Head-Butt
As Muslims, we enjoy boasting that we invented all sorts of stuff. Like chemistry. And sociology. And algebra. And Nintendo. And Filet-O-Fish. Some might be true… others are a bit of a stretch. But one thing I’m confident that Muslims invented is the word ‘head-butt’.
Where does the origin of this word come from? Why, in prayer of course. When the lines are too close together and you have people out of sync it can cause a potentially fatal hit when the ‘butt’ hits the ‘head’. They banned this move in the UFC and other mixed martial arts organizations because the fighters complained that the move was too lethal.
I used this example on my physics exam to explain the ‘two objects moving in opposite directions and colliding’ question. X = head and Y = butt or something. My teacher failed me and I dropped out of science because of it.
What could possibly make this even more fatal is if the person in front loses his wudu at the precise moment of the head-butt. That’s probably where the word knockout comes from (which I guess we invented as well).
Obnoxious Ring-Tones
I’ve covered plenty of articles on the ridiculousness of cell phones and no matter how many times you tell people, there’ll always be one moron who leaves it on.
But the worst are ringtones. You know, the ones where you replace the ringer with a really bad Bollywood or rap song to ‘show off’ to the world that you have bad taste. The right thing to do if your cellphone goes off in prayer is to quickly turn it off and/or throw your cell phone out the window. The wrong thing is to let it keep going during prayer and start bopping your head to the beats.
You know when the prayer is turning corrupt when the people around you start bopping their heads to the ringtone. Hell, once the Imam starts bopping you know the right thing to do is to save the prayer. So you do what any hero would do… you pull out the obstruction.
Prayer aside, ring tones are the worst idea in history next to low-rise pants.
Low-Rise Pants
Sometimes when I try to concentrate in prayer there are people in front of me that just simply ruin it for me. They don’t wear belts. And they don’t tuck in their shirts. The result is something so disturbing that I can’t describe it and will simply show you a censored picture:
The Muslim community might be divided every Eid as to whether the moon was sighted or not but there is definitely one thing Muslims around the world can agree on: this is the one moon sighting we don’t need to see.
