I’m drawing my salah.

I’m drawing my salah the way a child draws the wind - perhaps, not the thing itself — but its evidence certainly. Bent trees, wonky windows: two crooked lines pushed outward, like arms spread wide, and a sky in motion. What does a sky in motion look like you ask? A child’s version — actually even mine: a fat sun with lines shooting out haphazardly; flying V's that tilt — draw and repeat — blue crayon scribbled hard, venturing boldly beyond the page; arrows, spirals and looping lines. A sky that swirls and spills.

I begin to sketch my Fajr, pale and blue- no, I can do better… a bucket of blue and a sprinkle of purple- beautiful! Then, periwinkle — the fairy's paintbrush and the colour of breath in cold air. It is the peeping moon, sleepily drawing warmth from the rising sun.

Some time passes before I begin on Dhuhr. My Dhuhr begins to take form as a mound, low but rounded. Burnt yellow, clay — a surprising gold pressed in like my crayon has worn thin. It sits under my sun, heavier than my moon but hypnotic all the same.

My ‘Asr surprises me. I am drawing a house: a square-y thing with sweet windows and a funny-red door. But it is the paradisical shade I am drawn to, cast by the green of the trees that flank my little house.

Then…

a burst of citrus like I am peeling an orange and letting my art infuse its warm-bloodedness. My sun, previously just a fun round-like shape now frays with lace, suffused with this citrus, but also softer hues like a shy rose and wait- is that a hint of indigo? Though it has arrived almost hastily, it is loaded with the promise of a night full of angels standing guard. The adult in me does not see it of course, but the child in me does.

I am reaching for my darkest crayon now. The sky begins to fill, stars appear as dots - some dense, others barely there — scattered everywhere my hand, without rhyme or reason, inclines to place them. It is the sun that yawns now and the moon's invitation to surrender that pacifies the page. The birds roost. The house rests. The hill retreats into the shadows.

And now I am reaching for the white crayon — usually discarded in child’s play. But I am drawn to it like glitter on bare skin.

Every prayer I thought I rushed becomes a thin thread of light — barely visible but marks present all the same, teasing and testing its weight on the page. Each prayer that passed me by leaves a hollow shape- not empty, no, more like white matter between strokes, clouds left uncoloured, translucent to the weight of possibility.

Okay- at first glance this drawing of mine looks like nothing much. Squiggly, tentative circles, wobbly lines. Smudges where my hand has rested too long. I stop here -— messy - proof of how inconsistent I am. And in a way, earnest too like the little child whose eyes widen at her unimagined capabilities as she puts crayon to paper and bleeds out her little heart.

But as my adult eyes critically, anxiously scan my messy, half-finished, smudged and smeared, crayon-saturated paper, my child eyes tell me this and only this:

my salah is a work of art. 

Minara (b. 2022)

i drew my salah, 2025

Crayon on paper

[P.S. don’t all run to claim this great work of art 🤣}

Last week’s poll revealed — unsurprisingly — that for many of us, salah doesn’t always feel spiritually uplifting, weightless, or free from anxiety. And so we paused. With the start of 2026 right around the corner, we asked ourselves: what do we need to regulate, inspire, and reframe our relationship with prayer? Is it more philosophy? Psychology? Theology? We will always need those, of course. But what do we need right here, right now?

The answer, for us, felt like art.

A medium that doesn’t just explain mechanisms or name patterns, but makes them lived and felt. We know scientifically that salah reduces stress. We know physiologically that ritual regulates the nervous system. But what makes us want to pray when we are busy, tired, inconsistent, or grieving? What draws us back when instruction alone falls short?

Art is a language of faith, love, and experience. It conveys what cannot always be resolved, measured, or perfected. And so we were inspired to reimagine salah as a child’s drawing and to take you through a visceral meditation that invites you to draw your salah too.

And hey, just in case, our art didn’t do anything for you [hard to believe], well this is for you 🙃!

Our little reminder that Allah alone is al-Khaliq.

In drawing, writing, or imagining our salah, we are not elevating ourselves, but lowering our defences. Art becomes a form of remembrance: a way to inhabit faith rather than explain it. Beauty here is an alignment with the only Creator who is Beautiful and who loves beauty wherever it leads back to Him.

Wishing you a very blessed week ahead!

🎨

Love and du’as,

The Minara Team