Bargaining with God… How prayer in Islam was reduced from 50 to 5 times a day.

Since I had to take Islamic classes for so many years, some things just became a blur in my mind over time. However, there are a few stories that stand out because they were just funny and interesting. One of these stories is about the time when the “prophet” Mohammad had to bargain with his god to lower the required number of times people had to pray every day.

Apparently, Mohammad went up to visit god (Allah) in the 7th heaven and god told him that Muslims should pray 50 times a day. Then, Mohammad went down and saw Moses who convinced him to go back up to god and bargain with him. Mohammad went up again and god lowered the required prayers just a little bit. Then Moses told him to try again and Mohammad kept going back and forth until the required number of times people had to pray went down to 5 times a day. At that point, he decided to stop because he felt too embarrassed to go back up and ask for a lower number since that was a pretty good discount.

I always wondered why god didn’t realize that Mohammad was going to go back and ask for a better deal. Why didn’t god just ask for 5 prayers in the first place? And more importantly, why would god bargain? I mean, he is supposed to be the “Law Maker” not the “Deal Maker”. It just never made sense to me.

Can you imagine what life would have been like for Muslims if they had decided to stick to 50 prayers a day? If Muslims today had to work 8 hours a day and sleep at least 6 hours, that would leave them with 10 hours a day at 5 prayers per hour. This doesn’t include meals, showers, errands, family time etc. No one would have a life! Why would god need that? Is it a self esteem thing where he constantly needs to be praised? Or does he have a big ego and he just likes to hear it all the time? And what kind of god would “create” people for for the sole purpose of telling him he is awesome? That is not life. That’s slavery. But then again, we were always told that we were just slaves of god and he can do what he wanted with us. That is not a god I would want to worship.