Explore the five pillars of Islam

Before you begin 

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely. 
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers. 

Planning this activity 

• You could invite someone who’s Muslim to your session to share their own insights into the five pillars and how they put their faith into practise.  
• You could get in touch with the Muslim Scout Fellowship (MSF), one of our National Scout Active Support Units, and see if there are any nearby predominantly Muslim Scout groups that you could link up with to run this activity together. You can also find your nearest group on the MSF website.  

Setting up the activity 

• Gather some rectangular building blocks or columns of building bricks to represent each of the five pillars. Use a different colour for each pillar if you can. 
• Use sticky labels to add the name of the pillar. 
• You’ll need enough for each group to be able to collect a set.  
• Each group will also need a longer block or brick, to balance on top of their five pillars.  
• We’ve shared some example quiz questions. You can adjust these according to the experiences of your group. Choose whether or not you use the multiple choice options. 

Introduction: Talk about Islam 

1. Gather everyone together in a circle. Explain that Islam is the second largest religion in the world, with over 1.8 billion followers, who are called Muslims. It’s also the second largest religion in the UK. 
2. Explain Muslims believe there is one true God, called Allah (the Arabic word for God). Muslims believe that Muhammad was the last prophet sent by Allah, and that the Qur'an (the holy book of Islam) was revealed to him.  
3. Tell everyone that the Muslim place of worship is called a mosque or a masjid.   
4. Ask if anyone heard of the five pillars of Islam? If not, can the guess what they might be? Think about what a pillar is on a building or monument. 
5. Explain that the five pillars are core beliefs and practices in Islam, and that you’re going to do an activity to explore them. For Muslims, their faith is a way of life, and the five pillars provide a framework for their whole life. 
6. The five pillars of Islam are: 

• • Shahadah: the declaration of faith  
  • Salah: praying five times each day  
  • Zakat: giving money to charity or those in need 
  • Sawm: fasting during the month of Ramadan  
  • Hajj: pilgrimage to Mecca  

Run the quiz 

1. Divide everyone into groups. 
2. Give each group a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, so they can write down their answers.  
3. Explain that you’ll be doing a quiz. The aim of the quiz is to answer questions correctly to win a block, representing each of the five pillars. To win, teams will need to collect five blocks. 
4. Groups can win a block by answering a quiz question correctly.  
5. Each question links to one of the five pillars and if you answer the question correctly, you’ll win the corresponding block.  You’ll have multiple opportunities to win each pillar.  
6. Read out the questions, plus the multiple-choice answers if you’re using those. Try to alternate between the different groups of questions, asking a question about a different pillar each time.  
7. After each question, give groups time to discuss their answer and write it down. You may want to pause and reread the question during this time. 
8. When everyone’s ready, invite groups to share their answer and give a corresponding block to each team with the correct answer. 
9. Keep playing until at least one group have collected the full set. You can pick and choose from the questions, to give a good level of challenge/competition. You’ll find that some groups may end up with more than one of the same pillar. 
10. If two teams collect the same number of pillars at the same time, you could use the tiebreaker questions (with or without multiple choice answers) to determine a winner. 
11. Remember to congratulate teams who worked well together, who included everyone’s thoughts and the best communicators. 
12. When you’ve finished, take time to reflect on what you’ve discovered through this activity. We’re shared some ideas of reflection questions in the pink Reflection section on this page.