ABSTRACT
Human cognition and language are shaped by bodily experience, which in turn determines the way we deal with the world around us; the construction of meaning is a product of the interaction between humans’ bodies, brains, and surroundings. These surroundings include communications that take shape in various modes, including verbal and gestural forms. Prayers have an abstract element of communication that takes place alongside its phenomenological nature: it addresses an entity (God or another deity), who does not exist directly in the immediate surrounding. For Muslims, prayers are an important ritual, for which a person prepares and follows a certain path to reach a destination. This manifests in prayers’ cornerstones and stages like intentions, ablutions, direction, and the many gestural and verbal elements of prayers. These components can be seen as a set of mental representations in which religious performance is instilled. This chapter examines the nature of different metaphors in prayers, in which advanced mental spaces arise. These spaces are related to bodily movements and immediate surroundings alongside other metaphorical constructions that stem from a metaphysical relationship with a nonhuman, absent yet sacred entity.
