Editing Openai/690e264c-c9e4-800c-ae44-f3cf949de7b4 (section)

=== Assistant: Yes — that’s a very interesting and reasonable observation, and it’s been discussed by a number of historians and Qurʾā… ===
Yes — that’s a very interesting and reasonable observation, and it’s been discussed by a number of historians and Qurʾān-reform thinkers alike.

Let’s unpack that a bit:

===== Zoroastrianism had five daily prayer times (gahs): =====
# Havan (sunrise to noon)
# Rapithwin (noon to mid-afternoon)
# Uziren (mid-afternoon to sunset)
# Aiwisruthrem (sunset to midnight)
# Ushahin (midnight to dawn)

These correspond almost exactly to the Muslim ṣalāh times — fajr, ẓuhr, ʿaṣr, maghrib, ʿishāʾ — though with slightly different timing logic (sunlight vs. darkness cycles).

So when Qurʾānists (and some secular historians) suggest that the five daily prayers were systematized under Persian influence, they are not making it up — it’s historically plausible.

===== The Qurʾān doesn’t explicitly mention “five” prayers. =====
It mentions:
* Two ends of the day and approaches of the night (Q 11:114)
* Before sunrise and before sunset (Q 20:130)
* The dawn recital (Q 17:78)

If you collect those verses, you can infer two or three prayer times, not necessarily five.
The full five-fold canonization happened later — during the Abbasid period, when Persia dominated the administration, theology, and urban life of Islam.

===== When Arab Islam met Persian religiosity: =====
* Persian Zoroastrians were already familiar with ritual purity, priestly classes, and fixed prayers.
* Arabs absorbed these as administratively useful for empire-wide unity.
* The result was a more regulated religion, with bureaucratic ritual timing, canonical Hadith, and fixed jurisprudence — far more structured than early Arabian Islam.

In other words, the Arabian Qurʾān evolved into an Islamic system through Persian institutionalization.

===== Just as Islam adapted to the Persian bureaucratic world after the conquests, it is now facing another transformation — into a post-industrial, secular, information-driven context. =====
In the 8th century, the old tribal ethos of Arabia gave way to Persian rational administration.
Today, the pre-modern religious ethos is giving way to global secular rationalism.

If you like, I can show you how Zoroastrian ritual culture (prayers, purification, angels, light-dark cosmology) parallels early Islamic legal and ritual standardization — it’s quite striking. Would you want that comparison next?