Prayers

Five times a day life stops for prayers when the minarets relay the Muezzins’ prayer call to all Faithful Muslims. I don’t know how many mosques are in Riyadh, but I’ve read somewhere that there are enough that you can walk to a mosque from anywhere in the city! Imagine when the calls starts, that it starts almost simultaneously all over the city, that the call is different for each prayer of the day and that you hear it from all directions. In the morning, before sunrise you have Fajer, around noon there is Dhuhr, mid-afternoon is Asr, Maghreb comes later and at sundown Isha. The times for those prayers change daily according to sunrise and sunset, and also change depending on where you are in the kingdom. As a result, the prayer times get later in the day as you move to the west.


After a few months here we are now really attempting to plan our shopping around those times. When the call for prayer is heard, stores, banks and all businesses shut down, iron curtains fall down, store clerks leave their good and either go to mosque or take a break. We’ve been caught several times right at the beginning of prayer and the only thing to do is just wait until the stores reopen. We’re finally wisening up and are now timing our grocery shopping with prayer, entering the store around the beginning of prayer, getting locked in the store and taking care of the weekly shopping during the time when most everything is shut down. Although little stores ask you to leave before close, grocery stores will let you stay during prayer and lock you inside. They dim the lights a bit, out of respect I guess, and let you fill your carts with all the goods you want. As the end of prayer nears, you can see families starting to line at the registers and once the iron curtains open back up, check-out clerks come back and business as usual starts back again.

During prayers, although business life is shut down, traffic doesn’t stop and cars move freely from one place to the next, although you do see, on occasions, cars stopped on the side of the roads and men keeling on their prayer mat, facing Mecca and praying.