How many days a week do you go to church?
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THIRTY FIVE times a week – that’s the number of times that Muslims are supposed to pray in congregation, preferably in a mosque. This applies to men. Women are exempt from the encouragement to pray in mosques. They have a right to do so if they want to and many mosques have facilities exclusively for women so that they can join in the congregational prayers.
Practicing Muslims who have a mosque just around the corner and are free to go there will do so for the five times a day obligatory prayers. The prayer in the mosque, taking less than 10 minutes, would be no different than the prayer if it was performed at home. Exceptions to this are the midday obligatory prayer on Fridays and the non-obligatory twice a year prayers on the two celebratory days in the Muslim calendar. In these prayers there are sermons delivered by the imams of the mosques.
Muslims also make special effort in the fasting month called Ramadhan to attend the sunset prayers in mosques, so that they can share food and break their fasts together, and to attend the final prayer of the day in the mosques too where extra non-obligatory prayers are performed during which the imams recite the whole HQ in the prayers, from memory. In the summer in the northern hemisphere these extra night prayers often end after midnight, so it’s quite taxing on those with 9 to 5 jobs.