“Prayer is the pillar of religion; whoever abandons it has destroyed his religion.”
— Jafar al-Sadiq[commonly attributed] Hadith widely cited in Shi'i and Sunni collections under Ja'far's transmission; wording varies between sources
Commentary
This saying presents the daily prayer as the centre of religious life, an emphasis that appears throughout early Islamic legal literature and that Ja'far's traditions support. The image of the pillar expresses the claim that prayer structures the whole edifice of faith, so that its abandonment brings about the collapse of the rest. Wilferd Madelung's work on early Islamic jurisprudence treats such formulations as part of a wider effort to define religious obligation through practice. Hossein Modarressi, in his study of formative Shi'i thought (1993), notes that the legal traditions attributed to Ja'far were systematically collected by later scholars, and that their wording often varies. Marshall Hodgson observes that the centrality of ritual practice was common to the emerging legal schools of the eighth century. The saying is attributed to Ja'far in the transmission tradition, but its textual form differs across collections, and its authenticity is a matter for critical study.
Commentary
This saying presents the daily prayer as the centre of religious life, an emphasis that appears throughout early Islamic legal literature and that Ja'far's traditions support. The image of the pillar expresses the claim that prayer structures the whole edifice of faith, so that its abandonment brings about the collapse of the rest. Wilferd Madelung's work on early Islamic jurisprudence treats such formulations as part of a wider effort to define religious obligation through practice. Hossein Modarressi, in his study of formative Shi'i thought (1993), notes that the legal traditions attributed to Ja'far were systematically collected by later scholars, and that their wording often varies. Marshall Hodgson observes that the centrality of ritual practice was common to the emerging legal schools of the eighth century. The saying is attributed to Ja'far in the transmission tradition, but its textual form differs across collections, and its authenticity is a matter for critical study.