- Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H&HF): Whenever one of you is needy and brings that to other people, he will not be satisfied. and Whenever someone is needy and brings that to Lord, he shall give him what he wants. sooner or later.
- Imam Sadiq (As.): Whenever you had tenderness in your heart, Pray. because your heart doesn't get tender unless it's pure.
- I told to Imam Baqir (A.S): “What is the meaning of “truly, Ibrahim was awwah and patient”? He replied: “Awwah means (the one who is) praying (to) and wailing (for God) a lot.””
- “Two people, who have acted alike, enter the heaven, but one of them sees the other one in a higher place. Then, he says: O’ Lord! How come has he a superior place in comparison to me while we acted alike? God the Almighty replies: “because he asked Me (whatever he needed) and you did not do that”.
- “The most knowledgeable person to God is the one who asks more from Him”
- “Whoever prays a lot, the angels say: This voice is familiar (to us) and this is the supplication which is accepted and this is the need which is provided”
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The Holy Prophet (peace be upon him and his Household):
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وَ لَوْ عَرَفْتُمُ اللَّهَ حَقَّ مَعْرِفَتِهِ لَزَالَتِ الْجِبَالُ بِدُعَائِكُم
If you knew god the way you should’ve known, Mountains definitely will be moved by your supplications. - Crying out of fear of God is the key to his mercy, it’s a sign for his acceptance and it’s a door to answering [supplications]
- Pray to God and believe in his answeres. But understand that God won't accept prays from an unwitting oblivious heart.
The Journal of Communication
This special issue begins by reviewing the historical context of prayer and defining prayer. Next, the contextual and functional dialectics of prayer are elaborated for each of the articles in this volume. Finally, the methodology, interdisciplinaity, and uniqueness of each article is described followed by possibilities for future prayer research in the field of religious/spiritual communication. Prayer is evident in every culture with a recorded history.
Pre-historic archeological evidence of prayers for the dead date back to Neanderthal burial practices at Shanidar in Iraq and La Chapelle aux Saints in France (50,000 B.C.E., Zaleski & Zaleski, 2005). Some of the first recorded petitionary prayers are etched on cuneiform tablets by pre-Egyptian Sumerians (3,000 B.C.E., Kramer, 1959). Since the time of Sumer, our conceptual understanding of prayer evolved into a multitude of forms and functions described in the sacred texts of world religions (e.g., the Bible, Qur'an, Tanakh, and the Vedas). This historical lineage of prayer, from Neanderthal to Sumer, to major world religions, continues evolving in the era of modern social scientific prayer research. Some of this early prayer research is represented by Sir Francis Galton's (1872) statistical analysis of petitionary prayers, and William James' (1902) psychological and empirical writings on prayer. In more recent times, collections of prayer research have been published in the fields of psychology (e.g., edited volumes by Brown, 1994, and Francis & Astley, 2001) and sociology (e.g., a special issue of Poetics reports eleven empirical studies edited by Wuthnow, 2008), but there is no comparable collection represented in the field of communication--until now. Moreover, an analysis of academic prayer research publication trends for the fields of communication, psychology, and sociology from 1960-2010 show modest publication increases through 1990, and then a doubling of academic publications over the next two decades in all three disciplines (Baesler, 2012). With the increase of scholarly interest in the social scientific study of prayer, it is appropriate that the field of communication contribute to the interdisciplinary field of prayer research by introducing a collection of essays with a distinctly communication focus in this special issue of the Journal of Communication and Religion.