Why do Roman Catholics and Muslims use rosaries? Where did the practice(s) originate?

Question

Muslims call them subha or tasbih beads.

Answer 1

Well I am a Catholic. Originally monks and religious (consecrated souls) used to say the 150 psalms. The rosary in its entirety, contains 150 Hail marys, and is composed of 15 decades or what we call mysteries, which are moments in the bible we meditate on (Crucifixion, Annunciation). The fifteen decades represent the 15 rungs on Jacobs Ladder, the 15 steps of Solomons temple. The Rosary, the Catholic one that is, I don't know much about the Muslims, was given to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary herself in the 13th Century. St. Dominic couldn't convert sinners, and went into a cave at Toulouse, where after severe penance, the Blessed Virgin in an apparition gave St. Dominic the Rosary. Then through the Rosary St. Dominic converted entire provinces and peoples. This is what St. Louis de Montfort has to say,"The Rosary is the prayer of the angels and saints in Heaven because  they are engaged in celebrating the life, death and glory of Jesus Christ." I hope this helps.  

Answer 2

Muslim prayer beads are FAR from Rosaries.

They're used as a tool to keep track of where a person is when they're doing repetitious prayer.

The earliest known use is the Mala in Hinduism.

Answer 3

The rosary is a tool used for vocal prayer and meditative prayer.  Vocal prayer so that you won't be distracted by thoughts of let's say, did I pay the credit card bill, or when is my kids' doctor appointment.  By praying out loud, it focuses your thoughts on what you are saying.  Meditative prayer because each decade has a different Mystery, or time of Jesus' life.  The Mysteries come directly from the Gospels, so in retrospect, you are in reality praying the Gospels.  Like today is the Sorrowful Mysteries.  The first one is The agony in the garden.  We meditate upon what Jesus went through in the garden of Gethsemane, knowing that it was His last night on earth, and then the submission to the fact that He was to die.

The rosary is a very beautiful and spiritual prayer.

The traditional story of the rosary was that Mary herself appeared to Saint Dominic in the twelfth century. At that time, tradition says she gave him the rosary and promised Dominic that if he spread devotion to the rosary, his religious order would flourish. It is quite true that Dominic was quite devoted to the Blessed Mother, but no one knows for sure if Our Lady herself gave Dominic the rosary. If she did, it is quite certain that she did not give him a rosary that looks like the one we have today.  Originally the rosary had 150 beads, the same number of psalms in the Bible. In the twelfth century, religious orders recited together the 150 Psalms as a way to mark the hours of the day and the days of the week. Those people who didn’t know how to read wanted to share in this practice, so praying on a string of 150 beads or knots began as a parallel to praying the psalms. It was a way that the illiterate could remember the Lord and his mother throughout the day. The “Divine Office”; the official prayer of the church; is the recitation of the psalms over a four week period, and is still prayed today.

Answer 4

Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) used to use a pile of stones to count out her thikr (repeated phrases of praise).  Then Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and grant him peace) showed her how she could do it with her fingers.

I imagine early Muslims got the idea of using strings of beads from Christians.  Using the fingers is better, though.  It's a Sunnah (a practice of Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and grant him peace)).

Answer 5

The Rosary

Please see our How to Recite the Holy Rosary sheet in PDF format, and feel free to copy and distribute it freely. It's also available in Spanish.

In the Western Church

"The Rosary", says the Roman Breviary, "is a certain form of prayer wherein we say fifteen decades or tens of Hail Marys with an Our Father between each ten, while at each of these fifteen decades we recall successively in pious meditation one of the mysteries of our Redemption." The same lesson for the Feast of the Holy Rosary informs us that when the Albigensian heresy was devastating the country of Toulouse, St. Dominic earnestly besought the help of Our Lady and was instructed by her, so tradition asserts, to preach the Rosary among the people as an antidote to heresy and sin. From that time forward this manner of prayer was "most wonderfully published abroad and developed [promulgari augerique coepit] by St. Dominic whom different Supreme Pontiffs have in various past ages of their apostolic letters declared to be the institutor and author of the same devotion." That many popes have so spoken is undoubtedly true, and amongst the rest we have a series of encyclicals, beginning in 1883, issued by Pope Leo XIII, which, while commending this devotion to the faithful in the most earnest terms, assumes the institution of the Rosary by St. Dominic to be a fact historically established. Of the remarkable fruits of this devotion and of the extraordinary favours which have been granted to the world, as is piously believed, through this means, something will be said under the headings FEAST OF THE ROSARY and CONFRATERNITIES OF THE ROSARY. We will confine ourselves here to the controverted question of its history, a matter which both in the middle of the eighteenth century and again in recent years has attracted much attention.

Let us begin with certain facts which will not be contested. It is tolerably obvious that whenever any prayer has to be repeated a large number of times recourse is likely to be had to some mechanical apparatus less troublesome than counting upon the fingers. In almost all countries, then, we meet with something in the nature of prayer-counters or rosary beads. Even in ancient Nineveh a sculpture has been found thus described by Lavard in his "Monuments" (I, plate 7): "Two winged females standing before the sacred tree in the attitude of prayer; they lift the extended right hand and hold in the left a garland or rosary." However this may be, it is certain that among the Mohammedans the Tasbih or bead-string, consisting of 33, 66, or 99 beads, and used for counting devotionally the names of Allah, has been in use for many centuries. Marco Polo, visiting the King of Malabar in the thirteenth century, found to his surprise that that monarch employed a rosary of 104 (? 108) precious stones to count his prayers. St. Francis Xavier and his companions were equally astonished to see that rosaries were universally familiar to the Buddhists of Japan. Among the monks of the Greek Church we hear of the kombologion, or komboschoinion, a cord with a hundred knots used to count genuflexions and signs of the cross. Similarly, beside the mummy of a Christian ascetic, Thaias, of the fourth century, recently disinterred at Antinöe in Egypt, was found a sort of cribbage-board with holes, which has generally been thought to be an apparatus for counting prayers, of which Palladius and other ancient authorities have left us an account. A certain Paul the Hermit, in the fourth century, had imposed upon himself the task of repeating three hundred prayers, according to a set form, every day. To do this, he gathered up three hundred pebbles and threw one away as each prayer was finished (Palladius, Hist. Laus., xx; Butler, II, 63). It is probable that other ascetics who also numbered their prayers by hundreds adopted some similar expedient. (Cf. "Vita S. Godrici", cviii.) Indeed when we find a papal privilege addressed to the monks of St. Apollinaris in Classe requiring them, in gratitude for the pope's benefactions, to say Kyrie eleison three hundred times twice a day (see the privilege of Hadrian I, A.D. 782, in Jaffe-Löwenfeld, n. 2437), one would infer that some counting apparatus must almost necessarily have been used for the purpose.

But there were other prayers to be counted more nearly connected with the Rosary than Kyrie eleisons. At an early date among the monastic orders the practice had established itself not only of offering Masses, but of saying vocal prayers as a suffrage for their deceased brethren. For this purpose the private recitation of the 150 psalms, or of 50 psalms, the third part, was constantly enjoined. Already in A. D. 800 we learn from the compact between St. Gall and Reichenau ("Mon. Germ. Hist.: Confrat.", Piper, 140) that for each deceased brother all the priests should say one Mass and also fifty psalms. A charter in Kemble (Cod. Dipl., I, 290) prescribes that each monk is to sing two fifties (tw

Answer 6

The use of the rosary in Catholicism dates back to the early Middle Ages. The practice of priests conducting services in Latin with their backs to the congregation meant that the members of the congregation couldn't follow what was going on in any detail. In one particular service, the priest recited the psalms. As a substitute for following along, the congregation could say the same prayers over and over again, keeping count on the rosary.

Answer 7

muslim sometime read some words of glory to God for 100 times. They use it to just count upto hundred. They don't have any special belief in it. It is just to count.

Answer 8

Well, I am not familiar with the muslim faith, but there are prayers you say for each bead. You are to meditate on the sorrowful mysteries I believe, say the Our father, Glory Be to the Father, and also say hail mary's. My grandmother was catholic, so She taught me about it when I was real young. I did not join the catholic church however, so my memory is a little fuzzy. But the point of the sorrowful mysteries I believe is to remember the suffering of christ. The hail mary's you say because the catholic church, as my grandma put it, adores (or has great respect for) Mary, and they ask her to pray on their behalf; like a saint I guess. Any how, it is just a form of meditative prayer.

I did a quick google search and this is what popped up:

http://www.pacifier.com/rosary-center.or...

Looks like a really informative site.

Answer 9

Praying the rosary began around 800 AD. but it has continually changed with different meanings and purposes behind it.....

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-reli...