I was thinking about the word salah recently.

If you grew up around Hindi or Urdu, you know salah (सलाह / صلاح) as advice, consultation. “Salah do” means give me your counsel. “Salah-mashwara” is the whole ritual of sitting down with elders, friends, or anyone who might know better - and asking.1

In Arabic, salah (صلاة) means something else entirely: prayer. The five daily prayers. Namaz.

Same sound.2 Two traditions. Two meanings.

And then it clicked. What if prayer is consultation?

Not petition. Not transaction. Not “give me this, I’ll give you that.” Just - consulting. The way you’d sit with someone wiser and say: yaar, kya karun? What do I do here?

The Urdu-speaking mind doesn’t need a theological treatise to understand salah. You already know what it feels like to seek counsel. To admit you don’t have the answers. To sit with uncertainty and ask anyway.

That’s it. That’s namaz.

Here’s the thing: the Urdu salah isn’t some unrelated word that happens to sound similar. It’s an Arabic loanword. صلاح (ṣalāḥ) - meaning goodness, righteousness, sound counsel - traveled from Mecca, maybe through Baghdad, carried by Sufi saints and traders and poets, until it settled into the vernacular of Punjab and the Gangetic plains.3

So this isn’t two languages arriving at the same sound by accident. It’s the same word, split by centuries and geography, carrying different weights in different mouths.

The resonance I noticed? It was always there. Baked in.

And it’s not just an Eastern thing. The English word pray comes from Latin precari - to ask earnestly, to entreat.4 Not worship. Not praise. Asking. The West arrived at the same place through different sounds: prayer as petition, as seeking, as turning toward something wiser and saying help me understand.

Three traditions. Three etymologies. One gesture: the open hand.

ग़मज़दा तो हूँ पर सब्र करना है मुझे
दुआ में उठे हाथों की लकीरें भी बदलती हैं

Grief-stricken I am, but patience I must keep —
even the lines on hands raised in prayer can change.

  1. Every desi kid has been subjected to a “family salah session” where the actual advice is irrelevant - the ritual of asking is what matters. ↩

  2. Okay, not exactly the same. The Arabic ص (ṣād) is emphatic, and the vowel lengths differ. But to an Indic ear? Close enough. ↩

  3. I don’t have a source for the exact route. But Arabic loanwords flooded into Hindustani through Persian, Sufi poetry, and centuries of Islamic rule. The word’s journey is plausible, even if the specific path is my imagination. ↩

  4. From prex, meaning request or entreaty. The same root gives us “precarious” - originally meaning “obtained by prayer.” Which… says something about how uncertain answers from above can be. ↩