Otto Pilny

Orientalist painters, Pilny included, tended to depict Muslim worshippers in a variety of different positions within the same painting. While this a deviation from reality (the stages of prayer would have been followed in synchronicity by all present), artists doubtless wished to show their assumed Western audiences, in a single frame, the diversity of postures in Muslim prayer, as recorded in Edward William Lane’s influential An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Here, the man standing recites the Takbir or invocation to God; three others, kneeling, pray the Tashahhud; while two of their companions bow to the ground in Sujud.