What Is Islam? The Five Pillars and the Faith Behind Them

Ask a Muslim neighbor what Islam is, and you may hear about five practices before any doctrine: the declaration of faith, the daily prayers, the obligatory alms, the fast of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca. These "Five Pillars" are, for many Christians, the most visible side of Islam.

Behind each practice stands a belief about who God is, what is wrong with human beings and how they are saved, and those beliefs are where Islam and the apostolic faith part ways. This article describes the pillars from Islam's own sources, notes where Sunni and Shia Muslims differ, and gives the Orthodox Christian response.

In brief

The five-pillar list comes from hadith, the reports of Muhammad's words collected by al-Bukhari (died 870), Muslim (died 875) and others. The Qur’an commands each practice but does not number them, and details such as the five daily prayers come from hadith. The "Gabriel hadith" sets the pillars (islam) beside six articles of faith (iman) and the ideal of worshipping God "as if you are seeing Him" (ihsan). Shia Islam keeps the practices but names wilayah, allegiance to the Imams, among the foundations. Islamic teaching joins faith, deeds and God's mercy. But every pillar rests on a confession that denies that God has a Son, and Islam offers forgiveness without the Cross. Christians prayed at fixed hours, fasted and gave alms long before Islam. The Orthodox Church keeps these disciplines as means; the way of salvation is Christ Himself, received by grace in His Church.

Thesis: The Five Pillars are earnest acts of devotion, but they stand on a confession that denies the Son of God, and so they cannot bring anyone to the Father; prayer, fasting and almsgiving reach their true end only in Christ.

Where the "five pillars" come from

The phrase comes from a report transmitted by Abdullah ibn Umar. In the English translation published on sunnah.com, Sahih al-Bukhari 8 reads: "Islam is based on (the following) five (principles)," and lists the testimony that "none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and Muhammad is Allah's Messenger," prayer, zakat, the pilgrimage and the fast of Ramadan.¹ A parallel in Sahih Muslim 16 shows how carefully the order was guarded: when a listener put the pilgrimage before the fast, Ibn Umar corrected him, "the fasts of Ramadan precede the Pilgrimage."²

The fullest summary is the "hadith of Gabriel" in Sahih Muslim 8. A stranger in white sits before Muhammad and asks about islam, iman and ihsan. Islam, he is told, "implies that you testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and you establish prayer, pay Zakat, observe the fast of Ramadan, and perform pilgrimage to the (House) if you are solvent enough (to bear the expense of) the journey." Faith means to believe "in Allah, in His angels, in His Books, in His Apostles, in the Day of Judgment," and in "the Divine Decree about good and evil." Ihsan is "That you worship Allah as if you are seeing Him, for though you don't see Him, He, verily, sees you."³

Five of the six articles of faith also appear together in the Qur’an, which warns that "whoever disbelieves in Allāh, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the Last Day has certainly gone far astray" (4:136).⁴ {{very-strong: The five-pillar list itself is found in the two most authoritative Sunni hadith collections, not as a numbered list in the Qur’an.}} Mainstream Sunni and Shia Islam have never treated the Qur’an as a self-contained manual for these practices; the site's article Can the Qur’an Alone Produce Islam? explains why.

The five pillars, one by one

1. Shahada: the confession of faith

The confession echoes the Qur’an: "there is no deity except Allāh" (47:19) and "Muḥammad is the Messenger of Allāh" (48:29).⁵ Its first half expresses tawhid, God's absolute oneness, and Sura 112 spells out what that excludes: "He neither begets nor is born, Nor is there to Him any equivalent." Addressing Christians directly, 4:171 calls Jesus "but a messenger of Allāh" and commands: "do not say, 'Three'; desist ... Exalted is He above having a son."⁶ The confession that opens Islam is therefore, on its own terms, a denial of the Holy Trinity and of the eternal Son. (On whether the Qur’an describes the Trinity correctly, see Does the Qur’an Misunderstand the Trinity?)

2. Salat: ritual prayer

The Qur’an commands prayer repeatedly: "establish prayer and give zakāh and bow with those who bow" (2:43), for "prayer has been decreed upon the believers a decree of specified times" (4:103). Verses such as 11:114 name times of day.⁷ The number five comes from hadith. In the account of the night journey, God first enjoins fifty prayers, then reduces them as Muhammad, urged on by Moses, returns to ask for less: "These are five prayers and they are all (equal to) fifty (in reward)."⁸ Muslims pray facing the Kaaba in Mecca (2:144), and believers are called to the congregational prayer on Friday (62:9).⁹

Practice varies: a Pew Research Center survey of 39 countries found "three-quarters or more in 12 countries who say they perform all five salat daily," while in Central Asia far fewer pray several times a day.¹⁰

3. Zakat: obligatory alms

Zakat is a fixed levy on wealth. The Qur’an names its recipients, beginning with "the poor and for the needy" (9:60), and calls it a charity "by which you purify them" (9:103).¹¹ The rates come from hadith. A letter of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari 1454, sets out amounts for camels and sheep and says that "For silver the Zakat is one-fortieth of the lot," with nothing due below two hundred dirhams.¹² That one-fortieth (2.5 percent) is the familiar rate today.

4. Sawm: the fast of Ramadan

"O you who have believed, decreed upon you is fasting as it was decreed upon those before you that you may become righteous" (2:183). The fast belongs to "The month of Ramaḍān [is that] in which was revealed the Qur’ān," with the sick and travelers making up the days later (2:185). The daily fast runs from the moment "the white thread of dawn becomes distinct to you from the black thread [of night]" until sunset (2:187).¹³ Hadith add both its reward and its moral demand. In Sahih al-Bukhari 1903, Muhammad warns that if a person "does not give up forged speech and evil actions, Allah is not in need of his leaving his food and drink." And in 38: "Whoever observes fasts during the month of Ramadan out of sincere faith, and hoping to attain Allah's rewards, then all his past sins will be forgiven."¹⁴

5. Hajj: the pilgrimage to Mecca

The Qur’an makes pilgrimage "to the House" a duty "for whoever is able to find thereto a way" (3:97).¹⁵ Pilgrims enter the state of purity called ihram, walk seven times around the Kaaba, visit the holy places outside Mecca, sacrifice an animal "in commemoration of Abraham's sacrifice," and throw stones at three walls symbolizing the Devil; about two million make the journey each year.¹⁶ Its promise is forgiveness: whoever performs it rightly, says Sahih al-Bukhari 1521, "will return (after Hajj free from all sins) as if he were born anew."¹⁷ (On the claim that Abraham built the Kaaba, see Was the Kaaba Really Built by Abraham?)

Sunni and Shia: the same practices, different foundations

Shia Muslims pray, fast, give and make pilgrimage, but their tradition frames the foundations differently. In al-Kafi, one of the Four Books of Twelver Shia hadith, Imam Muhammad al-Baqir says: "Islam is based on five principles. They are: Prayer, al-Zakat (charity) fasting, Hajj and al-Wilayah," adding that people "accepted the other four but they left aside this [al-Wilayah]."¹⁸ Wilayah means allegiance to the authority of the Imams from the family of Muhammad. The scholar al-Majlisi graded this chain reliable.

The Shia reference work WikiShia lists five principles of religion (usul al-din): God's oneness, prophethood and the resurrection, shared with all Muslims, plus divine justice and the imamate. Its ten practical branches (furu' al-din) are prayer, fasting, hajj, zakat, khums, jihad, enjoining the good, forbidding the evil, tawalli and tabarri.¹⁹ Khums means "to pay one fifth of the annual surplus income," and Shia Muslims usually combine the noon and afternoon prayers, and the sunset and night prayers, while Sunnis usually pray them separately.²⁰ On the roots of the division, see Sunni vs. Shia Islam.

What the pillars assume about God and salvation

God. God is one in a way that excludes any eternal Son: "It is not [befitting] for Allāh to take a son" (19:35). To ascribe a partner to God (shirk) is the one sin the Qur’an says God does not forgive: "Indeed, Allāh does not forgive association with Him, but He forgives what is less than that for whom He wills" (4:48).²¹ By that standard the worship Christians give to Christ is the gravest sin there is.

Human beings. In the Qur’an, Adam "disobeyed his Lord and erred," and then "his Lord chose him and turned to him in forgiveness and guided [him]" (20:121-122; compare 2:37). Every person answers for himself: "no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another" (6:164).²² In this picture there is no fallen nature to be healed from within, and no one may bear another's sin.

Salvation. At the Judgment, "those whose scales are heavy - it is they who will be the successful" (7:8). Yet the Qur’an also says, "do not despair of the mercy of Allāh. Indeed, Allāh forgives all sins" (39:53), and Sahih al-Bukhari 6463 has Muhammad teach that "The deeds of anyone of you will not save you," not even his own, "unless and until Allah bestows His Mercy on me."²³ Islam is not a crude religion of earning heaven (see How Does Islam Save You Without the Cross?). The real difference is that God's mercy is announced, but God does not Himself enter human death to destroy it. The Qur’an denies the very event at the center of the Gospel: "they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them" (4:157).²⁴ {{very-strong: The Qur’an denies that God has a son (112:3; 4:171; 19:35) and denies that Jesus was crucified (4:157).}} On the historical evidence for the crucifixion, see Was Jesus Really Crucified?

Christians prayed, fasted and gave alms first

None of these disciplines began with Islam, and the Qur’an itself says fasting was "decreed upon those before you" (2:183). The prophet Daniel prayed "three times that day ... as was his custom since early days" (Daniel 6:10, NKJV), and the Psalmist says, "Seven times a day I praise You" (Psalm 119:164; 118:164 in the Septuagint).²⁵ In the Sermon on the Mount Christ teaches almsgiving, prayer and fasting together, each to be done "in secret" before the Father (Matthew 6:1-18).²⁶

The Didache, an early Christian church manual whose dating ranges in one standard reference from 50 to 120 AD, tells Christians to fast "on the fourth day and the Preparation (Friday)," to pray the Lord's Prayer, and adds: "Thrice in the day thus pray."²⁷ {{strong: Fixed times of daily prayer, a weekly fasting rule and almsgiving were Christian practice centuries before Muhammad was born.}} The Orthodox Church keeps them still: Wednesday and Friday fasts, the great fasting seasons, the daily cycle of services and a personal prayer rule (see our guides Why Christians Fast and How to Pray at Home).

So the question is not whether God wants prayer, fasting and generosity, but what they are for, and to whom they lead.

The Orthodox answer

Devotion is not yet salvation: Cornelius

Cornelius, in the Acts of the Apostles, lived much like the pillars. He was "a devout man and one who feared God with all his household, who gave alms generously to the people, and prayed to God always." An angel told him, "Your prayers and your alms have come up for a memorial before God" (Acts 10:2, 4). Yet the angel did not tell him he was saved. He told him to send for Peter, "who will tell you words by which you and all your household will be saved" (Acts 11:14).²⁸ God honored his prayers by bringing him to Christ and to baptism.

St Seraphim of Sarov drew the same lesson from Cornelius. In his conversation with Nicholas Motovilov (first published in 1903, long after the saint's death), he says: "Prayer, fasting, vigil and all other Christian activities, however good they may be in themselves, do not constitute the aim of our Christian life, although they serve as the indispensable means of reaching this end. The true aim of our Christian life consists in the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God." He adds that "only the good deed done for Christ's sake brings us the fruits of the Holy Spirit."²⁹

Not reparation but healing

The Orthodox Church in America's catechetical text on fasting puts it plainly: "Neither do men fast with the idea that their hunger and thirst can somehow serve as a 'reparation' for their sins," for the saints teach "that there is no 'reparation' for man's sin but the crucifixion of Christ."³⁰ Christians fast to be freed from the passions, and this is not passivity. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," writes St Paul, "for it is God who works in you both to will and to do" (Philippians 2:12-13).³¹ Grace always comes first; the human will truly cooperates. The Orthodox call this synergy.

Not "as if you see Him," but sons in the Son

The Gabriel hadith's highest ideal is to worship "as if you are seeing Him." The Gospel offers more. "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1:18). Because the Son became man, those united to Him receive "the adoption as sons," and the Spirit in their hearts cries "Abba, Father!" (Galatians 4:5-6). They become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), not by becoming God in essence, but by sharing His life by grace.³² St Athanasius summed it up: "He was made man that we might be made God."³³ That is theosis (see What Is Theosis?). It is given through the Church's Mysteries: "unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:5), and "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you" (John 6:53).³⁴

The verdict

The Five Pillars cannot do what Christ does, because the first of them confesses against Him. St John writes: "Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either; he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also" (1 John 2:23). Christ Himself says, "No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6), and St Peter: "there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).³⁵ The Orthodox Church therefore says plainly that Muhammad was not a prophet sent by God, that the Qur’an is not the word of God, and that its denial of the Holy Trinity, of Christ's divinity and of His Cross and Resurrection is false. She invites every Muslim to bring his hunger for God to the One who alone satisfies it, and to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Objections and replies

"Islam is simple: five clear duties. Christianity is full of mysteries."

Simplicity is not the test of truth, and the Christian confession is as short as the shahada: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Christ answered that this was revealed not by "flesh and blood" but by "My Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 16:16-17).³⁶ The question is which confession is true.

"You misrepresent Islam. It is not salvation by works."

Agreed: the hadith quoted above says deeds alone save no one. The problem is that this mercy rests on nothing God has done about sin and death. In Christ, the Son of God takes our nature, dies our death and rises, so that human nature itself is healed.

"Many Muslims are more devout than many Christians."

Christ warned against judging by visible piety (Matthew 6:1). Christian failure calls for repentance, not for another religion; and God answered devout Cornelius by sending him the Gospel.

What we can say confidently

• The five-pillar formula is found in Sahih al-Bukhari 8 and Sahih Muslim 16, and the Gabriel hadith (Muslim 8) sets it beside six articles of faith and the ideal of ihsan.
• The Qur’an commands prayer, zakat, fasting and pilgrimage, but key details, such as five daily prayers and the zakat rates, come from hadith.
• Shia tradition shares the practices but names wilayah among the foundations, adds khums, and commonly combines prayers.
• The Qur’an denies that God has a son and that Jesus was crucified; Islamic teaching joins deeds with divine mercy, without incarnation or atonement.
• Fixed-hour prayer, regular fasting and almsgiving were Christian practice before Islam; the Orthodox Church keeps them as means, not as the way of salvation.

What remains disputed

• {{debated: How far individual hadith reports, including these, go back to Muhammad himself. Muslim scholars graded them by their chains; Western historians, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, range from a radically skeptical minority view that the hadith are fabrications dating mainly from the ninth and tenth centuries to the view of many who accept "the broad outlines of the Muslim account" while testing each report.}}³⁷
• How closely today's rites match practice in Muhammad's lifetime; Britannica notes that Muhammad established the pattern of the pilgrimage, "but variations have arisen in it."³⁸
• The exact date of the Didache (estimates run from the mid-first to the early second century).

Conclusion

Muslims who keep the pillars often do so at real cost, rising before dawn and going without water through long summer days. A Christian should not mock this; he should look to his own prayer and fasting.

But the pillars confess a God who has no Son, and so they cannot lead to the Father whom only the Son reveals. The Orthodox Church offers the same disciplines in their true setting: prayer to the Father in the Son by the Holy Spirit, fasting that heals the passions, almsgiving that serves Christ in the poor, all within the life of the Church, where Christ is received in Baptism and the Eucharist. What Cornelius found, every seeker can still find: prayers that "have come up for a memorial before God" are answered by being brought to Christ.

Notes

1. Sahih al-Bukhari 8, English translation as published on sunnah.com, https://sunnah.com/bukhari:8 (read through the Internet Archive copy, https://web.archive.org/web/2025/https://sunnah.com/bukhari:8).
2. Sahih Muslim 16a, sunnah.com, https://sunnah.com/muslim:16a (Internet Archive copy).
3. Sahih Muslim 8a, sunnah.com, https://sunnah.com/muslim:8a (Internet Archive copy).
4. Qur’an 4:136; compare 2:285. Qur’an quotations are from the Saheeh International translation, as served by quran.com (https://quran.com).
5. Qur’an 47:19; 48:29 (Saheeh International).
6. Qur’an 112:3-4; 4:171 (Saheeh International).
7. Qur’an 2:43; 4:103; 11:114; compare 17:78 (Saheeh International).
8. Sahih al-Bukhari 349, sunnah.com, https://sunnah.com/bukhari:349 (Internet Archive copy).
9. Qur’an 2:144; 62:9 (Saheeh International).
10. Pew Research Center, "The World's Muslims: Unity and Diversity," chapter 2, "Religious Commitment" (9 August 2012), https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/08/09/the-worlds-muslims-unity-and-diversity-2-religious-commitment/.
11. Qur’an 9:60; 9:103 (Saheeh International).
12. Sahih al-Bukhari 1454, sunnah.com, https://sunnah.com/bukhari:1454 (Internet Archive copy).
13. Qur’an 2:183; 2:185; 2:187 (Saheeh International).
14. Sahih al-Bukhari 1903 and 38, sunnah.com (Internet Archive copies).
15. Qur’an 3:97 (Saheeh International).
16. Britannica Editors, "Hajj," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/hajj (read through the Internet Archive copy, 2026).
17. Sahih al-Bukhari 1521, sunnah.com (Internet Archive copy).
18. al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, vol. 2, book 1, chapter 13 ("The Fundamentals of Islam"), hadith 3, English translation and al-Majlisi's grading as given at Thaqalayn, https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/2/1/13/3; compare hadith 1, https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/2/1/13/1.
19. "Usul al-Din" and "Furu' al-Din," WikiShia, https://en.wikishia.net/view/Usul_al-Din and https://en.wikishia.net/view/Furu%27_al-Din.
20. "Khums" and "Performing two prayers together," WikiShia, https://en.wikishia.net/view/Khums and https://en.wikishia.net/view/Combining_two_prayers.
21. Qur’an 19:35; 4:48 (Saheeh International).
22. Qur’an 20:121-122; 2:37; 6:164 (Saheeh International).
23. Qur’an 7:8; 39:53 (Saheeh International); Sahih al-Bukhari 6463, sunnah.com (Internet Archive copy); compare Sahih Muslim 2816a.
24. Qur’an 4:157 (Saheeh International).
25. Daniel 6:10; Psalm 119:164. Bible quotations are from the New King James Version (Thomas Nelson, 1982).
26. Matthew 6:1-18 (NKJV).
27. Didache 8, trans. M. B. Riddle, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 7, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0714.htm; dating range from Peter Kirby, "Didache," Early Christian Writings, https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/didache.html.
28. Acts 10:2, 4; 11:14 (NKJV).
29. "A Wonderful Revelation to the World: St Seraphim of Sarov on the Aim of Christian Life. The Conversation with Nikolay Motovilov," English text as published by The Matheson Trust (with thanks to St Seraphim Cathedral, Dallas), https://themathesontrust.org/papers/christianity/Motovilov.pdf, pp. 1-2. On its first publication by Sergei Nilus in Moskovskiye Vedomosti (May 1903), see Alexander Strizhev, "What St. Seraphim of Sarov Didn't Say," OrthoChristian.com, https://orthochristian.com/161952.html.
30. Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 4, Spirituality, "Fasting," Orthodox Church in America, https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-almsgiving/fasting.
31. Philippians 2:12-13 (NKJV).
32. John 1:18; Galatians 4:4-6; 2 Peter 1:4 (NKJV).
33. St Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 54, trans. Archibald Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2802.htm.
34. John 3:5; 6:53 (NKJV).
35. 1 John 2:23; John 14:6; Acts 4:12 (NKJV).
36. Matthew 16:16-17 (NKJV).
37. Asma Sayeed, "Hadith," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hadith (read through the Internet Archive copy, 2026).
38. "Hajj," Encyclopaedia Britannica (see note 16).

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Didache. Trans. M. B. Riddle. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886.
• Athanasius. On the Incarnation of the Word. Trans. Archibald Robertson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4. 1892.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Seraphim of Sarov. The Conversation with Nikolay Motovilov. English text published by The Matheson Trust.
• Hopko, Thomas. The Orthodox Faith, vol. 4, Spirituality. Orthodox Church in America.

Other scholarship and reference

• Britannica Editors. "Hajj." Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Sayeed, Asma. "Hadith." Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Pew Research Center. The World's Muslims: Unity and Diversity. 2012.
• Kirby, Peter. "Didache." Early Christian Writings (online reference).

Sources from the tradition discussed (Sunni and Shia Islam)

• The Qur’an. Saheeh International translation. Via quran.com.
• al-Bukhari. Sahih al-Bukhari, nos. 8, 38, 349, 1454, 1521, 1903, 6463. English translation via sunnah.com.
• Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj. Sahih Muslim, nos. 8a, 16a, 2816a. English translation via sunnah.com.
• al-Kulayni. al-Kafi, vol. 2, book 1, chapter 13. English translation via Thaqalayn.
• WikiShia. "Usul al-Din," "Furu' al-Din," "Khums," "Performing two prayers together."