Prayer rug
piece of fabric, sometimes a pile carpet, used by Muslims and some Christians during prayer
A prayer rug or prayer mat, also called Sajadah, is a piece of fabric, sometimes a pile carpet, used by Muslims during prayer. It is also used by some Christians, especially in Orthodox Christianity, and some followers of the Baháʼí Faith during prayer. In Islam, a prayer rug is placed between the ground and the worshipper for cleanliness during the various positions of Islamic prayer. These involve prostration and sitting on the ground. A Muslim must have wudu (ablution) before prayer, and must pray in a clean place.
Prayer rugs are also used by some Oriental Orthodox Christians for Christian prayer involving prostrations in the name of the Trinity, as well as during the recitation of the Alleluia and Kyrie eleison. Its purpose is to maintain a cleanly space to pray to God and shoes must be removed when using the prayer rug. Among Russian Orthodox Christians, particularly Old Ritualists, a special prayer rug known as the Podruchnik is used to keep one's face and hands clean during prostrations, as these parts of the body are used to make the sign of the cross.
Most prayer mats are manufactured by weavers in a factory. The design of a prayer mat is based on the village it came from and its weaver.
The public source identifies “Prayer rug” as piece of fabric, sometimes a pile carpet, used by Muslims and some Christians during prayer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Prayer, piece and fabric.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q956956. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prayer rug” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.