Answer:
The Quran says: “O people! You are all in need of God. God alone is self-sufficient and worthy of all praise and adoration.”(1)
Therefore, God is absolutely self-sufficient and all His creatures are in need of Him. He is the One who fulfills all the needs of His creatures.
God does not need our worship, rather we need His worship so that we may attain eternal blessings through His service. The Quran says: “Whoever disbelieves and abandons Hajj, has indeed harmed his own soul. God is self-sufficient.”(2)
In another verse, He said: “Whoever strives and strives, strives for his own soul; for God is self-sufficient.” (3)
In another place, He says: “Whoever does a good deed, does it for his own good, and whoever does an evil deed, does it for his own harm. Then to your Lord you will all return.”(4)
In another verse, He says: “Whoever chooses purity, it is for his own good.”(5)
As a result, man develops in the light of good deeds and flies to the heaven of nearness to God and reaches eternal happiness. And he falls due to crime and sin and is caught in eternal misery.
Worship of God is doing any act that brings man close to God and keeps him away from evil.
Obviously, worship of God is not limited to prayer. Sincere service to people, helping people and helping the weak and needy, politeness and respect, restraining the hands, tongue and ears, etc. are all acts of worship. Doing any act that is recommended in the verses and narrations is worship.
God made prayer obligatory so that man, by remembering God, would abandon the desires of Satan and would come out of immorality and evil (7); therefore, its benefit is for man himself. For this reason, all divine prophets and heavenly books have called man to prayer. What was said was only a brief reference to the individual philosophy of prayer, and prayer and other acts of worship have profound wisdom from various social, cultural, political, and other aspects.
Prayer practically brings about solidarity among Muslims and a sense of one spirit among them; because they all pray for the same problem and towards the same Qiblah, and this will have valuable consequences.
On the other hand, we reach perfection by performing acts of worship, but it should be known that: the relationship between perfection and worship is not a situational and conventional relationship; rather, it is an essential and evolutionary relationship. Just as a cold body heats up due to the proximity of hot bodies, man also moves towards perfection in the light of connection and intimacy with absolute perfection.
Here, it is necessary to state a few introductions:
1. There is no absolute perfection other than God.
2. Perfection cannot be achieved except in the shadow of a relationship with absolute perfection.
3. Relationship with absolute perfection has its own specific ways, the best of which God has expressed in the form of acts of worship.
As a result, it becomes clear that by other than these ways, achieving perfection will be nothing more than a dream and an illusion.
In the Islamic perspective, all divine commands are in accordance with the interests and corruptions of the self-commanding self; that is, if, for example, the command to pray is given with specific details and conditions, it is all for the sake of the real interests in which the action is hidden and man is in dire need of it on the path to perfection and eternal happiness and without it he will be at a disadvantage. Of course, in some cases there are alternative solutions, but these cases are also specified in the divine religion, not by using one's own reason.
Furthermore, worship and relationship with God have two sides:
1. God, who is worshipped and is the object of praise and prayer.
2. A worshipper and a prayerful person.
Also, the most basic thing that a person needs on the path of worship and finding the path to God are two things:
Theology; that is, first, he must have a relatively correct knowledge of Him and know who he is facing.
Pathology; that is, he must know how he can establish a relationship with Him and what is the best, closest, most accepted, and safest path to Him?
Now the question arises: does God - who is absolute knowledge - know Himself and the best path for man to Himself better? Or does man, who has not yet properly known not only God, but even himself? So if He knows better and has placed the best path before man based on that and commanded him to follow it, what sound and solid logic would allow us to reject it and go to another path!
In short, the way of life - in all aspects, even in the worship of God - requires correct rules and laws, and violating them will only lead to going astray, decline, and destruction. There is no rule or law that can guide a person to his perfection except the law of God: (And who is better than God in judgment for a people who are certain) (8) because He is the Creator of all beings and the world of existence, and He Himself knows best what He has created and, based on the purposefulness of the world of creation (according to His wisdom), in which direction and in what manner it should go and follow the path and conduct. Therefore, turning away from the divine law - which is conveyed by the prophets - and turning to any rule or law other than God is considered the "approach of ignorance" (9).
Footnotes:
1. Fatir (35), verse 15.
2. Al-Imran (3), verse 97
3. Ankabut (28), verse 6.
4. Fajr (89), verses 27-30.
5. Dhariyat (51), verse 56.
6. Mu'minun, verse 2.
7. Ankabut (29), verse 45.
8. Al-Ma'idah (5), verse 50.
9. Ibid.
