Thank you very much IAMOP! I really appreciate the help!

Perhaps I should rephrase my question... Since I am unaccustomed to prayer and finding that I do indeed believe what I am reading in the Quran, how do I pray?

My apologies if I am being a nuisance with this, but I feel it is very important for me to know.

Greeting to all!

I am new here (just registered) but have been reading the site and have also bought a copy of the Quran A Reformist Translation and have been reading it. A bit of my history to perhaps clarify why I am not sure about how to pray. I was raised in an extremely conservative Christian atmosphere but could never really accept those teachings simply because of the anger, intolerance and outright hatred of other groups, even other Christian denominations I saw within the member of that church. In my early teens I started training in martial arts and eventually was introduced to Buddhism as a result. I picked up Buddhism and that's what I termed myself ever since (I'm now 45). However, Buddhism never, at least to my mind, answered the question of how all this (life, the world, the universe) started.

In Buddhism, prayer doesn't really exist per se. Especially petitionary prayer (i.e. "please help me heal" or "please help so-and-so to heal&quot. Some Buddhists do this but it is not considered "correct". That was another problem for me. I know that Christians pray for help and always end the prayer with "in Jesus' name" or "in Christ's name" and "amen". My question then is how does one pray in this, the Quran only, way? I've read on other sites before I found this one about the 5 times a day and that the prayers were, to my mind, extremely ritualized and had to be said in Arabic. That was/is a problem for me because I personally need to know and completely understand what I am saying and doing.

To put it another way, how does one pray and in what "format"? Or is there even a "format" one must adhere to or can one simply pray from the heart?

Thanks very much in advance!