HookRamadan moves — and that is the point
The Islamic calendar is lunar — twelve months of the moon, about 354 days — so Ramadan lands roughly eleven days earlier each year and slowly tours the seasons. When it coincided with the June solstice a few years back, Muslims in Glasgow were fasting for close to nineteen hours a day; when it falls in midwinter, the same fast shrinks to barely nine. Same command, wildly different cost. British Muslims did not abandon the midsummer fast: mosques filled, iftar meals started after 10pm, and scholars debated — and mostly rejected — proposals to follow Makkah's shorter timetable instead. The practice bent to the conditions without breaking.
That is the right way into this section. Islamic practices are not a list to memorise; they are a discipline lived under real conditions, and AQA tests them in two directions. AO1 wants what Sunni and Shi'a Muslims actually do — the Five Pillars, the Ten Obligatory Acts, prayer, fasting, giving, pilgrimage, festivals — with the detail right. AO2 wants you to weigh statements about those practices: whether hajj matters more than salah, whether fasting is really about hunger, whether outward ritual or inner intention carries the weight. Half the paper's marks sit on that second skill, so this page teaches both at once.
ModelOne framework, two traditions: Five Pillars and Ten Obligatory Acts
Sunni Islam organises duty around the Five Pillars — the image is structural: pillars hold the building of faith up. Shahadah (the declaration of faith), salah (ritual prayer), zakah (obligatory giving), sawm (fasting in Ramadan) and hajj (pilgrimage to Makkah). Remove one and the building is unsound.
Shi'a Islam arranges the same core differently, as the Ten Obligatory Acts: salah, sawm, zakah and hajj appear again, joined by khums (a one-fifth levy on surplus income), jihad (striving in God's cause), enjoining what is good, forbidding what is wrong, tawalla (love for God and those close to him, especially the Prophet's family) and tabarra (dissociation from those who oppose God). The shahadah is not listed as one of the ten — it is the foundation underneath all of them, assumed rather than counted.
Notice what this gives you for the exam: the overlap proves Sunni and Shi'a Muslims share one religion; the differences — khums, tawalla, tabarra — are ready-made material for any question asking for contrasting ways within Islam. And every one of these acts is communal as well as personal: praying in the same direction, fasting in the same month and converging on the same city knit the worldwide ummah into synchronised action.
MechanismShahadah and salah: the sentence and the timetable
The shahadah is a single sentence: the testimony that there is no god except God, and that Muhammad is God's messenger. Shi'a Muslims commonly add a clause honouring Ali as the friend of God. It is whispered into a newborn's ear, hoped for as a person's dying words, and — recited sincerely before witnesses — it is the entire entry requirement for becoming a Muslim. Everything else in this section is that sentence unpacked into behaviour.
Salah is the unpacking you can see. Preparation is wudu, the ritual wash; orientation is the qiblah, facing the Ka'aba in Makkah; the day is punctuated by five prayer windows — dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset and night — which most Sunni Muslims keep separately and many Shi'a Muslims combine into three sittings. Each prayer is built from rak'ahs, set cycles of standing, bowing, prostrating and sitting. On Friday the midday prayer becomes jummah, congregational prayer with a khutbah (sermon), which men are expected to attend at the mosque; women may attend but are not obliged to, and many pray at home. The visible differences matter for marks: Sunnis commonly fold their arms while standing, Shi'a Muslims let them hang; Shi'a worshippers prostrate onto a turbah, a small clay tablet, often pressed from the earth of Karbala. Five short interruptions a day is the theology: submission rehearsed until it becomes muscle memory.
A 4-mark question reads: Explain two contrasting ways in which Muslims perform salah. A full-marks answer is two developed points, nothing more. Point one: most Sunni Muslims pray five separate times each day at fixed windows (1 mark); tradition traces the number five to the Prophet's Night Journey, so keeping the windows distinct is itself an act of obedience (development, 1 mark). Point two: many Shi'a Muslims combine the five prayers into three daily sittings, and prostrate onto a clay turbah (1 mark); the turbah — often from Karbala — connects each prayer physically to the earth and to the memory of Husayn (development, 1 mark). Point, development, point, development — and the contrast must be genuine, not two versions of the same fact.
MechanismSawm and zakah: the fast that trains, the levy that purifies
Sawm is the Ramadan fast: no food, drink, smoking or sex from first light to sunset, opened each morning with a pre-dawn meal (suhur) and broken each evening (iftar), often communally at the mosque. The exemptions are built into the obligation itself: young children, the ill, travellers, the elderly, and women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or menstruating do not fast, making the days up later or feeding the poor instead (fidyah). The stated purpose is taqwa — consciousness of God — trained through self-mastery and enforced empathy with people whose hunger has no sunset. Inside the month sits Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, marking the first revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad; Muslims seek it in the odd-numbered nights of the last ten and believe devotion on that night outweighs a thousand months of ordinary worship, which is why some spend those nights living in the mosque.
Zakah is not a donation; it is the third pillar. Once a Muslim's qualifying wealth — savings, gold, business stock — has sat above a threshold called the nisab for a full lunar year, 2.5% of it is owed, full stop. The framing matters: zakah purifies the wealth that remains and is described as the right of the poor rather than the generosity of the rich. The scale is real: British Muslims are estimated to give well over £100 million to charity during Ramadan alone. Shi'a Muslims additionally pay khums — one fifth of surplus annual income — historically split between religious leadership, community causes and descendants of the Prophet in need.
Zakah is calculable, so calculate it. Amina holds £8,400 in zakatable savings for a full lunar year. The nisab that year, pegged to the gold price, is about £5,200. She is above the threshold, so she owes 2.5% of the whole amount, not just the excess: 0.025 × £8,400 = £210. Her brother holds £4,900 — below nisab — and owes nothing. One worked line shows you understand all three moving parts: a fixed rate, a wealth threshold, and an obligation rather than a choice.
CaseHajj: five days built to dismantle status
Every Muslim who is physically and financially able must make the pilgrimage to Makkah once in a lifetime; around 1.8 million people now perform it together each year. It begins with ihram: men wear two seamless white cloths, resembling burial shrouds, and all pilgrims renounce perfume, arguing and harming living things. A company director becomes indistinguishable from his driver — which is the design.
The rites compress Islam's story into geography: tawaf, seven circuits of the Ka'aba; sa'i, walking between the hills of Safa and Marwah, re-enacting Hajira's desperate search for water for her son Isma'il; wuquf, the afternoon spent standing in prayer on the plain of Arafat, widely understood as a rehearsal for standing before God on the Day of Judgement; a night at Muzdalifah gathering pebbles; then at Mina, stoning the three jamarat pillars, recalling Ibrahim's rejection of temptation; an animal sacrifice that launches Id-ul-Adha; and, for men, a shaved head to mark rebirth.
The classic case study is Malcolm X, who made hajj in 1964 and wrote home astonished: he had eaten from the same plate and prayed shoulder to shoulder with pilgrims of every colour, an experience that dismantled his belief that white and black people could never worship together. For AO2, run the tension both ways: hajj is a once-in-a-lifetime summit that costs UK pilgrims £5,000–£10,000 and excludes many through poverty or ill health (intention preserves their reward) — so is the peak experience really more formative than the daily, free, repeatable discipline of salah? Both sides have teachings behind them, which is exactly what a 12-marker wants.
ModelJihad: the word almost everyone misuses
Jihad means striving or struggling in the path of God — and the tradition splits it in two. The greater jihad is internal: the unglamorous daily fight to get up for the dawn prayer, keep the fast, tell the truth, control anger and greed. A well-known tradition reports the Prophet, returning from battle, telling his companions they were coming back from the lesser struggle to the greater one — the struggle with the self. For most Muslims, most of the time, jihad is entirely inward.
The lesser jihad is armed struggle, and it is fenced by conditions that read like just war theory: declared by a legitimate authority; fought in defence of Islam or the oppressed, never for conquest, plunder or forced conversion; a last resort after peaceful means fail; proportionate; protective of civilians, crops and water; and ended the moment the enemy seeks peace. Measure terrorism against that list and it fails on every line — self-appointed authority, civilian targets, no offer of peace — which is why British Muslim organisations condemn attacks carried out under the word. In the exam, define both jihads and then apply the conditions; the application is where the marks are.
CaseFestivals: two Ids and a day of mourning
Id-ul-Fitr ends Ramadan: before the special Id prayer, every household pays zakat-ul-fitr — a small gift of food or money — so that the poor can celebrate too; then new clothes, communal prayer, visits, sweets, and the strange lightness of eating lunch again. Id-ul-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, falls in the hajj season and commemorates Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son — identified in Muslim tradition as Isma'il — before God provided an animal in the boy's place. Families arrange a qurbani sacrifice (in Britain, through licensed abattoirs or overseas charities) and the meat is split three ways: household, friends and neighbours, and the poor.
Ashura, the tenth of Muharram, is where Sunni and Shi'a practice diverges most visibly. For Shi'a Muslims it is the day of grief: the martyrdom of Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, at Karbala in 680 CE — marked with processions, black clothing and majlis gatherings that retell the story, sometimes with acts of self-mortification most scholars now discourage in favour of blood donation. For many Sunni Muslims, Ashura is instead an optional fast linked to traditions of God's deliverance of Musa and his people. One date, two meanings: it is the sharpest contrasting-ways answer this section offers, so have it ready.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
The low-tariff openers are vocabulary checks, and one precise word is often the whole mark: nisab, rak'ah, ihram, khutbah. Learn the terms as terms. On the 4-mark contrast question, the trap is writing two versions of the same fact — the examiner needs two genuinely different ways or beliefs, each with one development sentence. Sunni–Shi'a differences are pre-packaged contrast: five windows against three sittings, zakah alongside khums, the two meanings of Ashura. Practise them as pairs.
The mid-tariff explain question rewards reference to Islamic teaching and sacred writings — and examiners credit accurate paraphrase, not just quotation. Anchor each practice in your own words and say where the anchor comes from: the Qur'an repeatedly pairs establishing prayer with giving to the poor, which is why salah and zakah travel together; the hajj rites consciously re-enact the story of Ibrahim's family; a famous tradition makes the worth of every action depend on its intention. One accurate anchor per belief, attributed, beats a misremembered quotation every time.
The 12-mark statement will usually rank practices — some version of X is the most important practice for Muslims. Argue both sides using the tradition's own logic: hajj as the once-in-a-lifetime summit against salah as the daily discipline that actually forms a person; the outward act against the intention that gives it value. Evaluate each argument as you make it — say why it is persuasive or where it fails — rather than bolting a paragraph of judgement on the end, and make the conclusion follow from the weighing you actually did. AO2 is half the marks on this paper, and SPaG rides on the 12-markers too, so paragraph cleanly and spell the technical terms the way you were taught them.