Salat: Learn How to Pray

You know the movements. Standing, bowing, forehead to the ground, sitting. What you do not know is what to say while you are down there — and nobody teaches it slowly enough to actually learn.

Salat does one thing: it teaches the words of the prayer, one step at a time.

FOURTEEN STEPS, IN ORDER

Every position of the prayer, from the opening takbir to the final salam, in the order you perform them. Tap one and you get four things, never mixed together: what your body does, the Arabic text, how to pronounce it written in your own language, and what it actually means.

Long passages — Al-Fatiha, the Tashahhud — are broken line by line, and the Arabic, the pronunciation and the meaning sit side by side on each line. That alignment is the whole lesson. You learn which words you are saying, not just the sound of them.

HEAR IT, THEN HEAR YOURSELF

For Al-Fatiha and the short surah, tap play and hear Mahmoud Khalil Al-Husary or Mishary Rashid Alafasy recite the line. Al-Husary's teaching recording is slow and detached, made to be repeated after.

Then record yourself. Both traces are drawn on the same waveform, so you can see where you rushed and where you stopped short. The recording stays on your iPhone and is never sent anywhere.

WRITTEN FOR YOUR LANGUAGE

The pronunciation is not transliterated once and reused. A French reader does not read "Subhaana" the way an English reader does, so each language gets its own spelling, written for the way that language is read aloud. English, French and Arabic.

A WIDGET THAT KEEPS TEACHING

Add the widget to your Home Screen and the positions cycle on their own, with what is said at each one. You are not studying — you are just seeing it, several times a day, until it sticks.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

No account. No sign-in. No network — the app makes no request of any kind, so it works on a plane, in a basement, anywhere. Nothing is collected, because there is nowhere to collect it to.

ON THE CONTENT

The prayer described here is the ground shared by the four Sunni schools of law. Where they differ — the wording of the Tashahhud, where the hands rest, the Qunut — the app tells you they differ, in a note on that step, instead of quietly picking one.

It is a memorisation aid. It does not replace a teacher, and it does not claim to.