Over a number of years teaching a course on comparative religion early in my career, I found that students had differential expectations of the subject areas we would cover when studying specific traditions. Although (for instance) discussion of Buddhism evoked immediate interest in meditative practices, the subject of Islam reliably elicited questions about gender relations and politics. Both of these, of course, are important areas of inquiry (and both will be discussed at various points in this book). However, over time I began to wonder both whether Buddhist meditation and monasticism were actually as innocent of gendered and political connotations as my students seemed to assume, and whether it was possible to direct more attention to aspects of Islam that were more constitutive of Islamic faith and identity. Although Sufi contemplative practices did garner interest, they are not prevalent in all Muslim communities, and American students often perceived them in generic “spiritual” terms scarcely identifiable as Islamic. Hence this work on prayer, which focuses primarily on ṣalāt (the canonical prayers ideally performed five times daily), but also on the more free-form duʿāʾ, or supplication. It hopes to direct needed attention to the practice most central both to personal faith and to the public constitution of Muslim communities, while showing that the spiritual and theological concerns inherent to prayer are not disembodied matters isolated from the issues of knowledge and authority that have exercised thinkers in other areas of Islamic law and thought.