Whether it’s a spiritual master immersed in meditation.

Or a drug addict inserting the needle.

Or a teenager loading into the battle royale.

Or the athlete at the peak of their powers.

Or the author absorbed into their novel.

These people could not be more different, but they’re all chasing the same feeling:

The flow state.

That feeling where time dissolves. Where total immersion takes over. Every thought, worry or stress disappears. Where focus doesn’t require effort. Where the story of “I” is forgotten and it surrenders fully to the moment. Where the past and future no longer exist. Pure being.

The modern world hasn’t completely stolen our ability to enter this state.

But it has become extraordinarily good at capturing our attention and redirecting it into every vice, addiction and distraction imaginable.

Nightclubs, gambling, promiscuity, binge drinking, weed, cocaine, sports idols, celebrity worship, six-hour screen time, the infinite scroll and endless entertainment.

It’s not random: People are craving the flow state.

And these vices offer something that resembles it: in a hit of temporary pleasure.

But obtaining it by these means always comes with a host of side effects:

Comedowns, hangovers, guilt, shame, apathy, depression and anxiety.

A sign from God that this isn’t the way.

What if worship was designed to fill the very void that people were chasing with all of this?

What if we’ve been created for no other reason:

I did not create jinn and humans except to worship Me. Quran 51:56

The flow state is the empirical evidence that the optimal human experience comes from dissolving into something bigger than yourself.

The sad thing is we’re now dissolving into everything other than the One we were supposed to.

It’s also not just obvious sin that prevents us from experiencing this.

Most practicing Muslims struggle to enter this state during worship for many reasons.

A career that consumes every waking thought. The pursuit of status. Obsession with family and social rank. Wealth as the goal and not a tool. Even halal entertainment, binged without restraint, pulls the heart into the same scattered state as any vice.

You will stand over your prayer mat with a mind in ten different places, unable to focus on the words you’re saying.

And so long as that’s the case, we will never be able to feel true contentment with our lives, which is why it’s so important we rediscover how to do it.

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Striving for Khushūʿ

Centuries before Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave “flow” its modern vocabulary, the Islamic tradition had already described a similar state of profound absorption in worship: khushūʿ.

Khushūʿ: to sink, to be low, to be subservient and to be still.

It refers to the heart that stands with complete humility, lowliness and full focus towards Allah.

Where every interior and exterior part of your body humbles itself and obeys its Creator.

Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya defined it:

khushūʿ in prayer happens when a person empties his heart for it, focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else, and prefers it to everything else. Only then does one find comfort and joy in it.

This sounds strikingly similar to the modern “flow state”. The emptying of the heart, the quieting of the mind, the exclusion of everything else, the comfort and joy that follows.

There is a spiritual mechanism built into all of us to enter this state.

We can experience it multiple times each day.

However, how we enter it is down to us.

Are we going to be successful, as Allah addresses it in the Quran:

“Successful indeed are the believers — those who have khushūʿ in their prayer” (Quran 23:1-2)

Or are we going to waste this Divine gift on Netflix, Instagram and reality TV?

Cheap Flow (Anaesthetic)

There is one big problem:

Cheap flow is so easy to come by.

It’s at our fingertips.

It’s accessible at any moment we choose.

Anxious → Alcohol

Sad → Drugs

Lustful → P*rn

Lonely → Netflix

Bored → Reels

Empty → Online shopping

And it feels good (at the time).

But it always leaves a hole.

Think of it as borrowing stillness, presence and focus for a short period of time but then having to pay it back later with interest.

The currency of this debt is usually anxiety, stress or depression.

If you have a bunch of real-world problems that you’re avoiding, and using cheap flow as the medicine, you’ve only paused the clock. And when the distraction wears off, the problems are still there, with more interest compounded.

This becomes an exponential trap.

More medicine is required as the problems get bigger.

This is the root cause of addiction.

Real flow does the opposite.

It doesn’t distract you from your problems.

It dissolves the version of you that was so attached to them in the first place.

The problems haven’t magically disappeared, but you’re no longer crushed by them.

You see them clearly for what they are.

Deep Flow (The Return)

So what separates deep flow from cheap flow?

Three things.

Firstly, what you dissolve into. Cheap flow dissolves you into the creation. A screen. A substance. Another person’s achievements. Deep flow dissolves you into the Creator. One is finite. The other is Infinite. The finite thing will always run out, leaving you emptier than before. The Infinite can never be exhausted.

Secondly, what it leaves behind. Cheap flow leaves residue. The hangover, the shame, the dread. Deep flow leaves sakīnah — a tranquillity that settles in the heart and stays.

Thirdly, what it does to the self. Cheap flow inflates the ego even as it numbs it. The drunk feels invincible. The addict feels entitled. The scroller feels informed. Deep flow does the opposite. It shrinks the ego until it fits back into its proper place. You remember who you are, who you’re not, and who He is.

Deep flow reorders everything.

An hour in it can anchor a whole day.

Problems shrink, anxiety leaves and sadness is replaced with contentment.

This is why it’s essential we learn how to reclaim it.

How to Reclaim It

The heart that absorbs haram through the eyes, ears, tongue and stomach will not fall into line when it’s time to pray.

Think about it: if your day has been filled with everything other than Allah from the moment you woke up, it’s highly unlikely that Khushūʿ is going to appear the moment you say ‘Allāhu Akbar’.

The heart is a vessel, and what you pour into it all day is what you will find when you stand before Him.

The Prophet ﷺ describes exactly how this works:

“When a servant commits a sin, a black dot appears on his heart. If he repents, gives up that sin and seeks forgiveness, his heart is polished. But if he continues, the black spot increases.”

And Allah confirms this in the Quran:

“But no! In fact, their hearts have been stained by all ˹the evil˺ they used to commit!” Qur’an 83:14

The hadith gives us the framework in a single sentence.

The sin leaves a stain → The stain clouds the heart → A clouded heart struggles to experience Khushūʿ.

And the remedy is clear: repent, leave the sin, seek forgiveness.

So the path back to Khushūʿ is not a ten-point plan. It is two things.

1) Leave the sin.

You already know which sins are blocking you. Not the small ones you barely notice. The ones you negotiate with. The sins you have convinced yourself you will deal with later.

Today is the day you make the intention to give them up for the sake of Allah.

Start with one, the biggest, the one you know you need to.

Start right now.

Do not wait until “the time is right”.

Leaving sin stops new stains from forming.

It is the first and non-negotiable step.

2) Seek forgiveness.

Leaving sins clears the path forward.

But the old stains remain.

There is a well-known narration attributed to the Prophet ﷺ:

“Whoever constantly seeks forgiveness, Allah will appoint for him a way out from every distress, a relief from every anxiety, and will provide sustenance for him from where he does not expect.” (Abū Dāwūd)

Commit to a daily practice.

A thousand.

Two thousand.

Five thousand.

Whatever you can manage.

The number itself doesn’t matter.

What matters is you find the threshold where a conscious effort is required and you need to plan it into your day, but it doesn’t begin to stress you out.

“Indeed, Allah loves those who are constantly repentant and loves those who purify themselves.” (Qur’an 2:222)

Ibn Taymiyyah summed it up perfectly:

No one has the right to think that he does not need to repent to Allah and seek forgiveness for his sins. Rather, every single person is in need of that at all times.

Cling to these two practices and your Khushūʿ in worship will return, Insha’Allah.

And this time it’s not being siphoned off to a feed or vice.

The scattered mind that stood over the prayer mat in ten different places begins to quiet.

The hadith promises a way out from every distress.

Relief from every anxiety.

Provision from where he does not expect.

These are not separate rewards stacked on top of istighfar.

They are the natural consequence of a heart that has been polished.

Polish your heart.

And the flow you were chasing in every wrong place finally returns to where it always belonged: back to Him.

And you’re asked why you’re not a memoriser of the Quran.

or why you don’t know the basics of your religion.

or why you skipped prayers and other obligations.

You try to muster some half-hearted response about how you “didn’t have the time” or were “too busy”.

Then you’re shown the amount of YEARS you spent on your phone.

We are running toward this reality.

On average we pick up our phones 150 times per day, but we struggle to pick the Quran up just once.

This isn’t only going to be a problem once we face Allah, it is having terrifying consequences, right now.

Our brains are rotting.

We can’t concentrate.

We’re losing the ability to experience joy.

Our memory is getting worse by the day.

We’ve outsourced all our critical thinking to chatgpt and claude.

The Odds are Stacked Against you

The most important thing to understand is this: You are not going to overcome this using your willpower.

This is not a willpower problem.

The smartest engineers and psychologists in the world have spent a generation making your phone irresistible.

The same mechanism that keeps a gambling addict feeding the slot machine has got you putting your hand in your pocket over one hundred times a day.

The social feed which never ends is the casino.

The anticipation of what we might find with that next refresh is just too much to refuse.

Our dopamine receptors never get the chance to rest, constantly jacked up on artificial junk.

Anything that induces this amount of dopamine, at such a frequency, compounds over time to induce anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure or joy).

Not to mention the internal chaos caused by feeling ten emotions in just one minute.

We’re quite literally being thrilled to death.

Our brains have been trained to expect new novel-information every five seconds.

This is why you struggle with reading a book, or a long article like this one, or even watching a movie.

You need that hit a lot quicker than ever before.

Our brains are being fried and are dying to breathe.

Ghaflah: Our New State

Ghaflah is a state of spiritual heedlessness in which a person becomes distracted from Allah and forgets what ultimately matters.

The phone is the most efficient ghaflah machine ever built.

Allah says in the Quran:

They have hearts they do not understand with, eyes they do not see with, and ears they do not hear with. They are like cattle. In fact, they are even less guided! Such ˹people˺ are ˹entirely˺ heedless. Quran 7:179

Now obviously, this isn’t talking about mobile phones, but just think about what it is saying.

Allah describes the heedless even further astray than cattle.

This is what these devices are turning us into.

Heads bowed to a six-inch screen.

Grazing on blue light.

We’re becoming the cattle.

But unlike the cattle, we have a choice.

We can continue wasting our lives on these devices or we can take back control.

If you’re ready to fight back, I must warn you: it’s going to be a war.

You’re going up against an opponent who has more resources than entire nations.

An opponent who has spent decades studying your brain, harvesting your data, and watching your every move until they know exactly what keeps you coming back for more.

Imagine a gambling addict trying to kick the habit whilst living in the casino - this is now you.

But this disease has a cure, and it’s reversible.

The antidote

Before giving you an actionable plan we first have to speak about the antidote to ghaflah.

If ghaflah is forgetfulness then the remedy is found in its opposite: remembrance (dhikr)

Remembering our ultimate purpose in life, which is to: worship Allah, to love Him, to obey Him and submit to Him.

Dhikr is one of the greatest means of achieving this.

“And the remembrance of Allah is greater...” (29:45)

“Remember Allah much that you may be successful.” (8:45)

“Truly it is in the remembrance of Allah that hearts find peace” (13:28)

“O you who believe, let not your wealth and your children divert you from the remembrance of Allah” (63:9)

“The parable of the one who remembers his Lord and the one who does not is like the parable of the living and the dead” (Bukhari)

How often are we forgetting Allah due to these devices?

Dhikr is the medicine.

And we desperately need a prescription.

Dhikr turns your attention away from the endless feed and toward the One who has never left you.

The phone scattered your attention into a thousand pieces.

Dhikr gathers it back, piece by piece.

But how do we even start trying to put these pieces back together?

The Action Plan (30 days)

I hope by now you have realised how serious the prospect of remaining addicted to our phones has become.

For the next 30 days commit to this and observe how much your life changes.

Step 1: Reclaim your mornings

The phone is often the first thing we touch, read and interact with upon waking up. This has to change. Setting your day up with huge artificial dopamine spike is possibly the worst thing you can do.

Buy an alarm clock and have the phone in another room all night.

You want to be up for as long as possible without checking your phone.

A morning should look something like the below:

• Wake up

• Make wudu

• Pray

• Morning Dhikr

• Quran

• Deep work block (side project, study, skill)

Check your phone at this point (if you have to) but if you have no reason to then continue with productive activities while reclaiming this new found presence and ability to focus.

Step 2: Make it resistible

Your phone has been made almost impossible to resist. Everything from the fluorescent colours, notification banners and auto-play features contribute to your inability to put it down.

So let’s reverse engineer this. If you can’t put it down because it’s so attractive, let’s make it ugly.

• Turn on grayscale (literally makes your display black and white)

• DELETE the apps feeding the addiction (Not a folder, not a lock, make reinstalling them a deliberate act)

• Turn off every notification that isn’t urgent

• Remove remaining apps from home screen

You want to turn your phone into an old-school nokia brick essentially. Keeping the bare minimum.

Step 3: Create distance

Set blocks of the day where your phone is not in the same room as you. Ideally make this time when you’re around family.

The phone doesn’t just steal your focus. It drives a wedge between you and the people getting sick seeing you with a device chained to your arm consuming your life’s energy.

• Choose two or three blocks each day where the phone lives in another room. (Example: start with meals, and the hours after fajr and between Maghrib & Isha)

Step 4: Embrace boredom

Your attention is a muscle that has atrophied and now needs to be re-trained.

The goal is to make your brain comfortable with slowness, with boredom, with one thing held for longer than thirty seconds.

• Read for longer than feels comfortable

• Do one thing at a time, don’t split your attention (No TV while eating, podcasts when driving etc)

• Own the awkward moments (Waiting in a queue, stuck at traffic lights or sitting on the train. These used to be scrolling time. Embrace the boredom & silence)

Being content with boredom is what repairs the fragmented mind, it builds resilience and allows you to build mental fortitude that would never come with the cheap scrolls.

Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation - Rumi

Step 5: Build something

Channel the new found time and energy into something productive.

Something you’ve wanted to do for years but “never had the time”.

Now is the time.

Pick one thing. Not three. The side project, the language, the skill, or the memorisation goal you always said you’d start “soon”. Write it down and give it a name, and start.

You’ve spent years scrolling and watching people do these things, getting a little dopamine hit that compensates for not actually doing it: now it’s your turn.

Building something real will give you the reason to not crave the hit of watching other people doing it.

It’s not going to be easy

That free time is going to feel uncomfortable at first. Your hand will reach for a phone that isn’t there, and the voice in your head will be loud.

Think about it, that voice in your head has not be alone with you in years.

You’ve fed it incessantly every 10 seconds for years.

Now, nothing. It will fight back.

The first few days will be the worst, they are genuinely rough, it usually comes with feelings of impatience, anger, tiredness, apathy and irritability.

Remember, you’re coming off a drug.

Expect a comedown.

But it doesn’t last.

Remember one day you’ll be asked what you did with the years you were given.

And I pray for us all that we don’t look back with regret about all the time we wasted.

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Online Da’wah is becoming a blood sport.

The culture of having to ‘dunk’ on the opposition and beat them into intellectual oblivion has taken a hold of us.

Da’wah (inviting to Islam) has become a contest for egos to shine.

Online debates have become entertainment.

We tune in to see if our representative can beat the opposing sides representative.

We win, because we have the truth on our side, it feels good, but how many people in the process have we pushed away from Islam?

How many people have doubled down on their anti-Islamic views because they’ve been embarrassed and belittled in front of the whole world?

I read a story the other day from during the time of the Prophet ﷺ and can’t stop thinking about how wrong we’re getting it.

It’s the incredible story of Thumama ibn Uthal.

The Most Dangerous Man in Arabia

In the sixth year after hijrah, the Muslims were establishing themselves as an increasingly powerful force in Arabia and the Prophet ﷺ began sending letters to rulers of the region to invite them to Islam.

Some rulers responded with diplomacy. Some ignored him. And then there was Thumama.

Thumama ibn Uthal was chieftain of the Banu Hanifah and one of the rulers of al-Yamamah, making him among the most powerful men in Arabia.

He ruled a region that essentially wrapped around Mecca and Medina. He controlled the trade routes north to Sham, south to Yemen, east to Iraq. If you wanted grain, dates, or anything that moved through the desert, you had to go through his territory. He was not just a tribal chief. He was like a king in every sense.

When the Prophet’s letter reached him, he did not send back a polite refusal. He murdered the entire convoy.

Not just the messenger, the entire mission.

This was a declaration of war from a man who could strangle both Medina & Mecca economically without lifting a sword.

Up until this point the strategy with Thumama was simple: do not poke him.

You wanted to leave him alone so he left you alone.

But Allah had other plans.

Months later, a Muslim patrol was hunting mercenaries in the desert.

They came across a group of travellers that didn’t look quite right.

It was a caravan that looked important, but it never had the protection that would normally accompany this type of convoy.

So they captured the group and took them back to Medina.

Among the men was a tall man in the robes of a king.

The Prophet ﷺ looked at the companions and said: “Do you know who you have brought?”

It was Thumama.

Can you imagine it? A man who has the blood of your companions on his hands, a man who has just declared war on you, one of the most powerful men in the region with the ability to fund an entire army against you or economically starve you has just been brought to your front door, accidentally. Subhan’Allah.

The Prophet ﷺ had every right to kill him.

It would send a chilling message to the entire region.

He had the right to demand whatever blood money or ransom that he saw fit.

His response could strike fear into the heart of every opposition force to Islam.

The Prophet ﷺ ordered he be tied to a pillar in the mosque and then did something strange.

He ﷺ ordered that the best food and drink be brought to him.

Muslims obliged by giving him the best they had to offer: milk, dates and meat. Thumama was eating better than most of the Muslims. Even food that was being made and prepared for the Prophet ﷺ was being given to him.

Imagine sharing your meals with a prisoner of war who wants you dead.

The Prophet ﷺ approached him and said: “What do you have, O Thumama?”

He responded: “If you kill me, you will kill a person who has heavy blood (i.e my death will be avenged). If you do me a favour, you will do a favour to a grateful person. If you want wealth, ask and you will get whatever you will demand.”

The Prophet ﷺ smiled and walked away.

The next day The Prophet ﷺ approached him and asked: “What do you have, O Thumama?”

He responded again by saying: “If you kill me, you will kill a person who has heavy blood. If you do me a favour, you will do a favour to a grateful person. If you want wealth, ask and you will get whatever you will demand.”

The Prophet ﷺ once again smiled and walked away.

The third day came and once again he was asked the same question, his response this time was: “What I have already told you”.

The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: “Set Thumama free.”

Thumama stood up and walked straight out of the mosque.

Everyone was bewildered.

No ransom. No revenge. No prisoner exchange. No conditions.

He just got to leave.

About ten minutes later Thumama walked back into the mosque and declared:

I bear testimony that there is no god but Allah and I testify that Muhammad is His messenger.

He then said:

O Muhammad ﷺ, by Allah, there was no face on the earth more hateful to me than your face, but now your face has become to me the dearest of all faces.

By Allah, there was no religion more hateful to me than your religion, but now your religion has become the dearest of all religions to me.

By Allah, there was no city more hateful to me than your city, but now your city has become the dearest of all cities to me.

Do you see what happened?

Where has he just spent the last three days?

Inside a mosque observing Muslims.

There wasn’t a show put on for him.

Just three days of unfiltered access watching Muslims pray, recite Quran and hearing the Prophet ﷺ speak to the congregation.

Whilst being shown genuine kindness and hospitality.

That’s all it took.

That’s all it took for a man to give up his kingship.

Incredible.

The first Muslim to perform Umrah

Remarkably, the story doesn’t even stop here.

He was in the convoy that was captured as he was on his way to Mecca to perform Umrah (pagans performed this in the days before Islam).

Now he asked the Prophet ﷺ: “what should I do?”

The Prophet ﷺ taught him how to perform Umrah as a Muslim and sent him on his way.

Thumama became the first person in history to enter Mecca to perform Umrah as a Muslim.

As he was reciting the Muslim talbiyah affirming the absolute oneness and sovereignty of Allah. The idol worshippers of Mecca were incensed. They drew their swords. Who was this man calling upon one God in their city, the city of idols? They moved to attack him but realised who he was.

“Have you left the religion of your forefathers?” they asked.

Thumama replied: “No. I have embraced Islam with Muhammad ﷺ, the Messenger of Allah.”

Then he made them a promise:

“By Allah, not a single grain of wheat will reach you from Yamama until the Prophet ﷺ gives me permission.”

The people of Mecca had to beg the Prophet ﷺ to tell Thumama to open the trade routes back up.

He ﷺ commanded Thumama to lift the boycott. And Thumama, now a loyal Muslim, obeyed without question.

This resulted in a colossal power shift in the region which would ultimately lead to the conquest of Mecca a few years later.

The problem with winning

Here is what did not happen.

The Prophet ﷺ did not debate Thumama. There was no theological sparring match. No point-by-point refutation of idol worship. No clever takedown of pagan belief. No “destroying” him with facts and logic.

He ﷺ did not lecture him. He ﷺ did not sit him down and run through the proofs of Islam. He ﷺ did not demand an explanation for why Thumama had killed his companions.

His conversion happened because he saw Islam. Not an argument for Islam. Islam embodied, in the character of the Prophet ﷺ and the community around him.

We have turned calling people to Islam into a contest.

This is the impulse response. When someone attacks and smears your faith. When they lie, and propagandise your beliefs.

You want to beat them. Embarrass them.

But we have to remind ourselves they are not our teachers, the Prophet ﷺ and His ﷺ companions are.

They are the example of what we have to strive to embody.

There is no point meeting them at their level because as soon as we do we’ve lost.

The Prophet ﷺ could have killed Thumama and been justified.

He could have ransomed him and funded the Muslim army.

He could have humiliated him and sent a message to every ruler in Arabia.

He instead treated his enemy with dignity. He fed him the best food & let him go free.

And what happened?

A conversion that was so transformative that the Quraysh, who had spent years persecuting the believers, were now begging the Prophet ﷺ to stop his newest companion from starving them.

What will you show them?

The next time you have the opportunity to represent Islam to someone, ask yourself: will my actions and words bring people to Islam or push them away?

Winning feels good for about five minutes but it only serves your ego, nothing else.

You might be someone’s only example of Islam they ever experience in their entire life.

But imagine they saw something they didn’t expect? Dignity instead of pettiness. Patience instead of rage. Generosity instead of greed.

That is what happened to Thumama.

Three days of watching Muslims be Muslims, and the most hated face on earth became the most beloved.

The Prophet ﷺ did not win an argument with Thumama ibn Uthal. He won a heart. And through that heart, an entire kingdom.

And whose words are better than someone who calls ˹others˺ to Allah, does good, and says, “I am truly one of those who submit.”? Good and evil cannot be equal. Repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend” Quran 41:33-34

Just for the next few minutes, I want you to ask yourself one question:

What if Islam is true?

In this ‘hypothetical’ scenario, that Islam is the truth, then God exists, which means Satan also exists.

Satan, in this reality, has one goal: to keep the people away from the remembrance of God, by any means necessary.

So let’s use our imaginations and try to think about how this made-up world would look.

In this fictional world, it’s reasonable to assume, this make-believe character, Satan, would want to control all the influential and powerful people who are in charge of the affairs of the wider population.

An Island where they all get together and commit the worst crimes imaginable would be extremely valuable to him to ensure these people could be easily blackmailed and manipulated into pushing his demonic agenda.

I’m sure that, in this make-believe world, anything with a demonstrably negative impact on its citizens would be glamorised, celebrated, and woven into the fabric of its society.

Alcohol, a neurotoxic poison, would be the means to celebrate every event, achievement and milestone.

Gambling would be marketed as entertainment and advertised everywhere you look, normalising addiction, desperation and ruin.

Drugs would be rebranded as escapism, freedom or healing, as they hollow out minds, families and communities.

In this fantasy world, children would be the number one target for the antagonist Satan, because they would be the easiest to manipulate.

If they could be conditioned during adolescence, they’d likely remain trapped for the rest of their lives.

So things like p*rn would be super accessible to them, conditioning their developing brains to form distorted expectations of intimacy and relationships for the rest of their lives.

It would be extremely advantageous if they were constantly exposed to a fluorescent device held inches from their faces, capable of delivering an endless stream of rapid, low-effort dopamine hits, eroding their attention span, focus, and capacity for critical thought.

This would condition their brain’s reward system to constantly seek instant gratification, making activities that require patience, discipline, and sustained effort seem far less rewarding.

Pursuits that provide long-term satisfaction would feel pointless and unappealing.

Instead of looking for purpose they’d become addicted to consumption.

That would be a real win for the antagonist, Satan.

It’s just hypothetical though, don’t worry.

Moving into adulthood, they’d be conditioned to believe the ultimate life transaction is this: trade their best years — eight hours a day, for 50 years — to retire when they are old, incapable but finally ready for some long-awaited ‘freedom’.

The financial system, in this world, would likely be built on debt, interest and speculation, keeping its people trapped in cycles of borrowing and repayment.

The population would be forced to work endless hours so they can borrow more money to buy things that they couldn’t afford.

The people would be given a personal score to demonstrate how good they are to borrow and repay this money (with interest of course).

The people would begin to brag to each other about how good their score is, and see it as a personal accolade and something to be proud of.

In this reality where God exists and Satan is trying to keep people away from this truth, he’d face a problem:

The people were created to worship.

It’s built into them.

Hardwired.

He can’t remove it, so he’d have to redirect it.

And so in this hypothetical world, materialism wouldn’t just be a culture — it would be the religion. A person’s value would no longer be measured by their character, integrity, or humanity, but by the amount of wealth, status, and possessions they accumulate. Their worth, their identity, their reason for being — all of it attached to what they own.

Another big problem this character Satan would face is with the people trying to ruin his plan.

The people who are saying Islam is the truth:

Muslims.

This would be his hardest fight so he’d have to get dirty.

His plan could only work if he could convince all the people who aren’t Muslim that Muslims are their enemy and they have to stay well clear of Islam.

He would have to use his puppets in the ruling class, the media and every algorithm at his disposal, to convince the population that Muslims are barbaric, cruel, backward and oppressive.

He’d need them to associate the word “Muslim” with fear before they ever met one.

He’d need a headline every week. A new outrage. A fresh reason to keep the suspicion alive.

Muslim nations declaring Islam is the truth and that the Islamic way of life is the optimal life transaction would have to be destroyed and their leaders removed, one by one, while the world watched and accepted it as normal.

Wars would be manufactured.

False flags would justify invasions.

In this hypothetical reality, World Trade Centre Building 7 would collapse at freefall speed, seven hours after the other towers had fallen, due to ‘office fires’.

Whole countries would be destroyed.

Millions dead or displaced.

And the survivors who fled for safety to prosperous, safe nations — they would then, ironically, get blamed for all of the problems those nations face at home.

A huge win for the antagonist, Satan.

It’s just hypothetical though, don’t worry.

In this world, where Islam is true, by default the Islamic way of life would have to be optimal for every single person.

It would have to be better than the way they were currently living.

If it wasn’t, then Islam couldn’t be the truth.

So all one would have to do to disprove the entire religion of Islam, is live like a Muslim for a period of time, say 30 days, and then truthfully say to themselves ‘my life has not improved, therefore Islam cannot be true.’

In this hypothetical world, that would be impossible.

Thanks for reading.

Pray five times per day.

Memorise Qur’an.

Seek knowledge.

Be a present spouse.

Raise righteous children.

Build your career.

Socialise.

Solitude.

Stay fit.

Sleep enough.

These obligations are all real.

All sacred.

But every hour you give to one is an hour taken from another.

All in continuous competition.

You simply cannot win.

You can only choose what you’re losing at any given hour.

This is the dance.

And it only stops once you’re in the grave.

Here’s the problem:

You’re trying to achieve something that is structurally impossible to perfect.

The weight of responsibility

This isn’t an excuse for laziness either.

Or a reason to only focus on one area and neglect everything else.

Your ambition should be excellence in every discipline.

Five prayers in the masjid.

Hafiz of the Qur’an.

A fully present spouse.

A great salary.

Top 1% physique.

But we feel like this is just impossible to achieve.

You pray five times a day, but you haven’t opened the Qur’an in weeks.

You’re making progress at work, but your fitness has collapsed.

You’re present with your spouse, but your knowledge-seeking has stalled.

Many greats of our tradition have wrestled with the same problem.

Ibn al-Jawzi, wrote the following about 800 years ago:

I don’t like to be indebted to anybody. But I like to write books. How can I write books if I have to go make my own money? And then if I make my own money, it clouds my heart and I can’t calm my heart with worship. But if I take a little bit away from making money and I calm my heart with the worship, then I have to be isolated. Then I don’t give the due to my family.

He understood something we’ve largely forgotten:

The self is not designed to sustain maximum intensity across every front simultaneously.

The solution is not to try harder.

It’s to stop trying to do everything at once.

But how do we implement this into our daily, chaotic lives?

Through the two-tiered system:

• The non-negotiables

• The rotating focus

One tier keeps everything alive.

The other lets you go deep on one thing at a time. Over a few years, the compound effect makes you unrecognisable.

Tier 1: the non-negotiables

The five daily prayers are not on the list.

They are the list.

They are the skeleton everything else hangs on.

You don’t negotiate the skeleton.

You don’t skip a prayer because you’re tired, busy or unmotivated.

It does not matter if it means you’re late to work, you miss the gym or you miss some of the game.

Every day you wake up your number one priority is ensuring you make your prayers, everything else is secondary.

The prayer is not another obligation competing for your time.

You want the day to bend to prayer times, not the other way around.

If you’re having success in business but not praying, you’re not successful.

If you’re having success in the gym but not praying, you’re not successful.

If you’re having success in your marriage but not praying, you’re not successful.

When you treat it as the non-negotiable floor, everything else organises itself around it.

The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) said:

There is nothing between a person and disbelief except abandoning Salah (Prayer).

Once the prayers are locked in you then identify the minimum viable version of every other obligation.

The floor.

Not the ceiling.

What’s the smallest version of each that you can maintain consistently without breaking?

For fitness, maybe that’s two sessions a week, not five.

For Qur’an, maybe it’s reading for ten minutes per day, not a page of memorisation.

For your spouse, maybe it’s thirty minutes of undivided attention, not a date every other night.

For knowledge, maybe it’s one short lecture while you commute, not a full course of study.

The floor is not meant to be impressive.

That’s the point.

It’s maintainable.

And maintainable beats ambitious every single time, because maintainable actually gets done.

The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) said:

The most beloved deeds to Allah are those that are done consistently, even if they are small.

Tier 2: the rotating focus

Once the floor is solid, you pick one domain and push it toward excellence.

Not all of them. One.

For a season. Maybe a month. Maybe a quarter.

One area where you go beyond the floor and genuinely push hard.

You memorise a page of Qur’an a day.

You train five times a week.

You read a book of fiqh cover to cover.

You take your spouse out every weekend.

You launch the side project.

The other domains? You keep them at the floor.

You don’t let them collapse.

But you also don’t feel guilty that they’re not progressing.

They’re not supposed to be progressing right now.

They’re in maintenance mode.

Then the season ends.

You rotate to the next after seeing significant progress in one domain.

Maybe you spent three months dialling in your fitness.

Now you redirect that surplus energy toward memorising Qur’an.

Three months later, you redirect it toward seeking knowledge.

What’s the best thing about this approach?

The floor keeps rising.

Once you spend a season memorising the Qur’an, you’ve raised your baseline with it. When it goes back into maintenance mode, you’re not returning to just ten minutes of reading. You’re returning to memorise a few lines per day.

After an intense season working on your physical health, you’re not going back to two beginner sessions a week. You’re now training three or four times with purpose. You know what you’re doing in the gym. You’ve built habits around nutrition. The old floor is gone.

Every area you spend a season improving, you build a permanently higher floor.

You never go back to where you started.

You can handle intensity.

You just cannot handle intensity in every direction simultaneously.

The compound effect

Over a year, you’ve made real progress in multiple domains instead of imaginary progress in all.

Over five years, you’ve transformed every area of your life without ever burning out, because you were never trying to do all of it at once.

The old scattered approach is the comfortable one.

It lets you feel busy without ever being effective.

You can tell yourself you’re working on everything while making no real progress on anything.

The rotating focus approach strips that away.

It forces you to admit that right now, in this season, you are not prioritising your fitness. Or your Qur’an. Or your career.

You are choosing to put those on maintenance while you push something else.

That’s uncomfortable because it feels like neglect.

But it’s not neglect.

It’s strategy.

The man who tries to dig ten wells at once dies of thirst.

The goal is not to arrive at some perfect state where all obligations are peaking at 100% simultaneously.

That state does not exist.

Not for you.

Not for the scholar.

Not for the companions.

The Prophet ﷺ himself would divide his time.

He had seasons of intense worship, seasons of family, seasons of battle, seasons of teaching.

The goal is to keep striving.

“And those who strive for Us, We will surely guide them to Our ways. And indeed, Allah is with the doers of good.” Qur’an - 29:69

They inherit a set of conditions and call it normal.

But if you hold the standard Western belief about where we came from — that the universe appeared from nothing, life emerged from chemistry, and consciousness is just neurons firing — I want you to try something with me.

Just for the next few minutes, ask yourself one question: What if Islam is true?

I know how that sounds, especially as the guy who thought that religion was for people who couldn’t think for themselves.

I was the guy who believed in science, reason, and evidence.

It turned out that I, in fact, was the idiot.

What I didn’t know then is that Islam doesn’t ask for blind faith.

It makes a testable claim.

One that can be verified or disproven.

The Case Against Randomness

If you opened your fridge and found your phone sitting on the top shelf, you wouldn’t say “random chance” and move on.

You’d use logic.

Someone put it there.

If you walked into a shop and saw a laptop on the shelf, you wouldn’t tell yourself all those parts just randomly assembled themselves, made their way to the store, and now here they are for you to buy.

But you’ve never seen the creator of that laptop?

You’ve never visited the factory?

However, you know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that it had a creator.

It was designed.

It has a purpose.

You believe this about every single object you interact with.

The phone in your hand: designed.

The coffee cup on your desk: created for a purpose.

The universe, life, human consciousness: random accident?

Does that actually make sense to you?

We only call something random when we don’t yet understand the equation behind it.

So, if nothing in this universe is truly random, why would the most complex equation ever to occur — the creation of the universe itself — be the one exception?

Or were they created by nothing, or are they their own creators? (Quran 52:35)

Why Islam?

It’s fair to ask why Islam and not another religion.

I held the same objection.

If there are thousands of religions, they can’t all be true, so they must all be man-made.

Here’s what I learned:

Islam confirms the other Abrahamic faiths.

Muslims believe God sent a long line of prophets to every nation, all with the same message: worship God alone.

But after each prophet passed, the scriptures were corrupted.

People altered God’s commandments.

They began worshipping idols instead — idols that took the form of statues, prophets, celebrities, and also intangible things like money, status, career, fame, and power.

The Quran was revealed to Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as the final, preserved scripture.

It translates to “The Reminder.”

And unlike every text before it, God promises to protect it:

It is certainly We Who have revealed the Reminder, and it is certainly We Who will preserve it. (Quran 15:9)

That claim is either true or false. And it’s testable.

The Evidence

I’m going to present a case for why Islam has to be true.

Books have been written on this topic, but for the purpose of this article I’ll condense it to two main points:

• the Quran is a scientific miracle

• the Quran is a linguistic miracle

While other prophets’ miracles were witnessed only by those alive at the time — Moses splitting the sea, Jesus curing the sick (peace be upon them) — those miracles became historical events once the prophets passed.

The miracle of the Quran is different.

It is timeless.

It can still be observed and experienced today. It is the primary reason people revert to Islam.

Unlike other religious texts, the Quran contains no contradiction.

Fourteen centuries of critics have passed and not a single error has been found.

Do they not then consider the Quran carefully? Had it been from other than God, they would surely have found therein many a contradiction. (Quran 4:82)

i) Scientific Miracles

In over 1400 years, despite all its advancements, science has not been able to disprove a single statement in the Quran.

Not only that, modern science has confirmed dozens of scientific claims made in the Quran.

Here are the ones that convinced me this could only come from an intelligence beyond the human mind:

• The Expanding Universe: “We built the universe with great might, and We are certainly expanding it.” (Quran 51:47). Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1929 revealed that the universe is expanding.

• The Big Bang Theory: “Do the disbelievers not realize that the heavens and earth were once one mass, then We split them apart?” (Quran 21:30). The Big Bang theory, first proposed by physicist Georges Lemaître in 1927, describes the origin of the universe as a single point of immense energy that began expanding, marking the birth of space and time.

• The Composition of Living Things: “And We created from water every living thing.” (Quran 21:30). By the early 1800s, chemists discovered that water made up the majority of living tissues.

• Mountains Beneath the Surface: “Have We not smoothed out the earth and made the mountains as its pegs?” (Quran 78:6-7). Modern geology confirms that mountains have deep roots extending into the Earth’s crust, much like pegs or stakes.

• Orbit of the Planets: “And He is the One Who created the night and the day, the sun and the moon — each traveling in an orbit.” (Quran 21:33). Modern astronomical discoveries confirm that all celestial bodies follow well-defined orbits and move in a precise, structured manner.

• The Barrier Between Salt and Fresh Water: “He released the two bodies of fresh and salt water, yet there is a barrier between them they do not cross.” (Quran 55:19-20). Oceanographers discovered that where saltwater and freshwater meet, an invisible barrier prevents them from fully mixing.

• Iron’s Extraterrestrial Origin: “We also sent down iron, with its mighty strength and many uses for mankind.” (Quran 57:25). Modern science confirms that iron is not native to Earth. It was delivered by meteorites.

Bold claims for a man in 7th-century Arabia without any formal education, access to scientific knowledge, or technological advancements.

All of them are impossible to have been known by someone of that time and era.

And this doesn’t scratch the surface.

ii) Linguistic Miracles

The Quran hasn’t just made scientific claims that were later proven true.

It is also a miracle in linguistic terms.

Unlike other religious texts, the Quran is in first person.

It is God speaking to mankind.

If you have never listened to it, I want you to try something.

Click the link below, close your eyes, and listen to Surah Ar-Rahman.

Then ask yourself: if there were a God, and He were to reveal guidance to mankind, would it sound like this?

Listen to Surah Ar-Rahman

Take Surah Al-Baqarah, the Quran's longest chapter as another example.

Its 286 verses are arranged in a concentric ring structure — themes introduced at the beginning are mirrored at the end in reverse order, with the central message resting at the core. The chapter opens by addressing believers, disbelievers, and hypocrites, and closes by addressing the same three groups in reverse. The story of Adam near the beginning is answered by the story of Abraham near the end. Laws about marriage in the early sections mirror laws about divorce in the later ones. This is not a loose pattern. The symmetry is mathematically precise, and it runs through the entire Quran.

What makes this remarkable is that ring composition was only identified by Western scholars in the late 20th century.

A 7th-century illiterate man receiving revelation in fragments over 23 years could not have engineered it.

The Quran being revealed in Arabic ensured the message of God could be delivered concisely, in only around 600 pages, making it easy to understand and memorise.

If it were revealed in English, it would have taken thousands more pages to express the same meaning and depth.

If you’re not convinced yet, your belief has to be that a man who could neither read nor write (a historical fact) made all of this up and then managed to present it in the first person as if he were God while:

• Making it free of contradiction.

• Making scientific claims that wouldn’t be realised for centuries.

• Ensuring no other person was able to replicate even one verse like it.

• Describing in remarkable detail the Creation of the Universe, the Creation of Man, the Day of Judgment, Heaven and Hell.

• Giving rulings on marriage, divorce, inheritance, disputes, rules of war, trade, business, charity, criminal justice, diet, dress code, parenting and more.

• Discussing, in depth, prophets and civilisations of the past even though previous scriptures were not translated into Aramaic — not that he would even be able to read them.

• Using advanced writing techniques like ring composition, where themes at the beginning and end of a passage mirror each other, creating a symmetrical balance throughout the book.

• Making it easy to memorise with its melodic rhythm. To this day, 10 million people have memorised the Quran cover to cover. It is the only book in history that could be passed down from generation to generation without the physical book itself.

And We have certainly made the Quran easy to remember. So is there anyone who will be mindful? (Quran 54:22)

I haven’t come close to doing justice to how miraculous this book is.

Anyone who has experienced it knows that when you pick it up, you’re not reading it. It’s reading you.

It speaks to the circumstances unfolding in your life and guides you through them.

We have certainly set forth every kind of lesson for people in this Quran, so perhaps they will be mindful. (Quran 39:27)

The Burden of Proof Is Yours

If this were a court case, and one side presented hundreds of pieces of evidence, you’d have no trouble using your logical and rational mind to accept it as the truth.

To dismiss this without a counterargument isn’t rational. You wouldn’t approach any other serious topic in your life this way.

So here’s my challenge.

Don’t take my word for it.

Try to disprove it.

Investigate this like your life depends on it, because it does.

Read the Quran.

Ask the hard questions.

And if you’re really curious, try living like a Muslim for 30 days.

If your life doesn’t improve, walk away.

I already tried to disprove Islam and couldn’t.

That’s why I’m writing this.

You have the burden of proof now.

What are you going to do with it?

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