Palms Up Together

No — 🤲 holds the palms open; 🙏 presses them together. Many Muslims raise cupped hands for du'a: a request to God, in set formulas or in your own words, separate from salah, the fixed daily ritual prayer, though du'a wording also appears inside salah. 🙏 covers prayer, thanks and pleading in general.

One skin tone colors both hands; this emoji has no mixed-tone version.

What does it mean when someone sends it to you?

Read the words next to it: prayer or plea. Devotional or grief wording points to dua, often for someone's health or safety. Next to a named item or favor, it is hands held out to receive: please, I need this. Sent alone, it doesn't settle which.

Public posts from 2021 show both: one asks for prayers for the sender's sick father, another uses 🤲 to beg for a laptop.

The open-hands appeal is far older than emoji

Art and inscriptions from ancient Mesopotamia and its neighbours show raised hands appealing to gods or honouring rulers from the Early Dynastic period, in the third millennium BCE, onward — an old parallel, not the emoji's direct ancestor. In Muslim practice, du'a stays flexible: a 2019 study at two New York Sunni high schools found students comfortable making du'a in English.