Foundation  /  Al-Arbaʿūn al-Nawawiyya  /  Hadith 3

Islam is built upon five

بُنِيَ الْإِسْلَامُ عَلَى خَمْسٍ: شَهَادَةِ أَنْ لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ وَأَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا رَسُولُ اللَّهِ، وَإِقَامِ الصَّلَاةِ، وَإِيتَاءِ الزَّكَاةِ، وَحَجِّ الْبَيْتِ، وَصَوْمِ رَمَضَانَ

Buniya l-islāmu ʿalā khams: shahādati an lā ilāha illā Llāh wa-anna Muḥammadan rasūlu Llāh, wa-iqāmi ṣ-ṣalāh, wa-ītāʾi z-zakāh, wa-ḥajji l-bayt, wa-ṣawmi Ramaḍān.

“Islam is built upon five: testifying that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God; establishing the prayer; giving the zakāt; pilgrimage to the House; and fasting Ramadan.”

Translation by Alyph Academy. We translate rather than reprint: the classical Arabic is public domain, published English translations are not.

Reading notes

• “Built upon” is a load-bearing metaphor. بُنِيَ — buniya, “was built” — sets up a structure with supports. Commentators standardly draw the inference the image invites: what rests on supports is larger than the supports. The five are named as what the building stands on, not as an inventory of the building.
• The order is not the order in hadith 2. Here pilgrimage precedes fasting; in the hadith of Jibrīl fasting precedes pilgrimage. Both orderings are in the received text of the same collection, two pages apart. Whatever the sequence is doing, it is not establishing rank.
• The transmission formula was changed. Al-Nawawī has Ibn ʿUmar say سَمِعْتُ — “I heard the Messenger of God say” — where both Ṣaḥīḥs have the plainer قال قال رسول الله. Direct hearing is a stronger claim of transmission than reported speech.
• Al-Nawawī’s Arabic here matches neither Ṣaḥīḥ. He takes the shahāda clause as al-Bukhārī has it (وأن محمدًا رسول الله) and the pilgrimage clause as Muslim has it (وحج البيت); al-Bukhārī has only والحج, and Muslim has وأن محمدًا عبده ورسوله. The result is a composite. This is ordinary in an abridged recension — but it means his Arabic cannot be quoted as “the wording of al-Bukhārī” or “the wording of Muslim,” which is a mistake worth not making.

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