Islam approaches the same terrain—the human being’s need to grow, to become better, to stop sabotaging himself—from the opposite direction. It does not begin with know yourself in the therapeutic sense, however. It begins with tazkiyatu-n-nafs, the purification of the self, and purification, by definition, is a subtractive process. You are not adding a better self-image. You are removing what is blocking your fitrah—the natural, unclouded disposition—that was already there.

The three states of the self

Interestingly, as it always is (because Islam is incredibly comprehensive), the Qur’an is detailed and precise about the anatomy of the ego, describing it in three states rather than treating it as a single fixed thing. There is an-nafsul ammaarah bis-suu—the self that commands towards evil, referenced in Suratu Yusuf (12:53), impulsive and self-justifying. There is an-nafsul lawwaamah—the self-reproaching soul of Suratul Qiyaamah (75:2), the one that catches itself mid-sin and feels the sting of conscience. And there is an-nafsul mutma’innah—the soul at peace, addressed directly in Suratul Fajr (89:27–28) and invited to return to its Lord, pleased and pleasing.

This is, structurally, a theory of moral development—a path from impulse to conscience to peace—except the destination is not self-actualization, rather nearness to Allah jalla wa’alaa. Ibnul Qayyim, writing extensively on the diseases of the heart, treats arrogance, envy, and self-admiration (‘ujb) not as personality traits to manage but as spiritual illnesses with prescribed cures, most of which involve doing something for someone else before you’re asked.

The Sunnah as a deliberately humbling architecture

This is where the practice gets interesting, because the Sunnah reads almost like a behavioral intervention against the ego, centuries before psychology had a word for it.

Initiating salam is not merely etiquette. The Prophet ﷺ is reported to have said that the one who initiates the greeting is closer to Allah—a hadith found in the collections of Abu Dawud and At-Tirmidhi, graded hasan. Superiority wants to be greeted first, to be sought out. Islam simply removes that option from the Muslim and hands him the first move instead.

Serving one’s family is treated the same way. The well-known narration that the best of you are those best to their families locates greatness not in public achievement but in the unglamorous, unwitnessed work of the home—precisely where entitlement is hardest to sustain.

Sitting with the poor and the weak has an almost uncomfortable directness in the tradition: the Prophet ﷺ was told, in various narrations concerning his companionship with the poor, to keep himself with those who call upon their Lord morning and evening, seeking His face—an instruction some early mufassirun connect to Suratul Kahf (18:28). Status-seeking cannot survive prolonged proximity to people who have nothing to offer it.

And forgiveness—choosing not to win—runs against nearly every instinct the ego has. Yet Allah describes the reward of the one who forgives as resting with Allah Himself (Suratu-sh-Shura, 42:40), which is another way of saying: the ego wants a witness to its victory, and Islam gently removes the audience.

Authentically, not every phrase attached to the Sunnah softens the ego circulates with an equally strong chain. Some of the finer behavioral formulations—apologizing first, listening more than speaking—are drawn from the scholarly commentaries and essentially spirit of authenticated hadith and prophetic character rather than a single verbatim narration, and should be understood as such rather than quoted as if each line were a hadith in itself.

Why this reads as better psychology, not just better theology

The social science on this is worth taking seriously because I know that for some, this reads as pure coincidence. Researchers studying humility have repeatedly found that it functions less like a personality trait you either have or lack, and more like a muscle—weakened by short-term self-focus, strengthened by regular exercise under strain, particularly in relationships. One line of longitudinal research found that humility correlates with lower depression, greater life satisfaction, and stronger social self-efficacy across both student and adult populations. Other work in positive psychology has framed humility as an antidote to what one review called the self-fixated spirit of the age—language that could have come from a khutbah as easily as a journal.

None of this proves the theology. But it does suggest the mechanism is real. In that a self that is trained to attend outward—to greet, to serve, to forgive, to listen—experiences measurably less of the anxious self-monitoring that defines so much modern distress. Islam simply supplies the reason for the practice that the research can only describe the effect of. You don’t sit with the poor because it will regulate your cortisol. You sit with the poor because Allah told you to seek His face there, and the regulation is a mercy that comes along for free.

The humblest man was also the greatest

The line that anchors all of this is the character of the Prophet ﷺ himself—described across the seeraj (Islamic History) as the most excellent of creation, and yet the man who mended his own sandals, sat on the floor with his companions, and could not be distinguished from them by a stranger walking in. Greatness and humility were not in tension in him; humility was the visible surface of his greatness.

That is the whole argument, compressed: the self is not developed by being centered. It is developed by being decentered on purpose, in specific, repeatable, other-facing acts, until what remains is no longer defended. Every act of humility is not a loss of self. It is the self, finally, getting out of its own way.

This week, Dear Reader, pay attention to yourself. Pay attention to yourself this week, Dear Reader. Notice how often your ego asks to go first, restrain yourself once, and see what happens when you let it go last. May Allah ease you.

The Prophet ﷺ was reported to have said, “A woman is married for four things: for her wealth, for her lineage, for her beauty, and for her religion. So choose the religious one, and may your hands be rubbed with dust (i.e, may you prosper).” Apparently, the line everyone remembers is the verdict at the end. The part everyone lives by is the list at the beginning. Wealth. Lineage. Beauty. Religion. Fourteen centuries later, three of those four still run the market, and the fourth has been interestingly demoted to a tiebreaker. We have not abandoned the Prophet’s list. We have in fact completely reversed his ranking and kept the reversal a secret, even from ourselves.

I want to write about what is actually happening between men and women who are trying to marry nowadays, and I’m not even talking about the version we perform at gatherings, where everyone wants a spouse of good character and modest means and a soft heart. I want to talk about the version underneath, where people are sorting one another by what they can extract and what they can display. It is not a pretty thing to look at directly. But I think we owe it an honest look, because the dishonesty is costing people their iman (faith) in marriage itself. Again, Dear Reader, walk with me with these lists:

The three women, and the thing they have in common

Let me begin where my own observation began, with three kinds of women I kept noticing. The first has decided, somewhere quietly, that she does not need to become anything. She is waiting to be selected. Her plan for her life is a man with money who will arrive and lift her into the life she has pictured. She is not lazy in any simple sense; she has often worked hard at the one thing the market told her to work hard at, which is being chosen. But she has built nothing she could stand on alone.

The second went the opposite way. She looked at the first woman and was repelled. She decided early that her life would never sit in a man’s hands, that she would build her own floor so that no one could pull it out from under her. And in building it, something happened she did not plan: the home stopped interesting her. The idea of pouring herself into a household began to feel like a smaller life than the one she had constructed. She did not reject homemaking out of arrogance. She rejected it because she had seen, often in her own mother, what it costs a woman to give everything to a home and be treated as though she gave nothing.

The third is the one I find hardest to write about, because there is pain in her position. She set out to be the second woman. She wanted the independence, the standing, the self-built floor. But she stalled somewhere in the middle, as most people do at most things, and the floor was never finished. What remained, though, was the expectation. She still feels owed the high man, the established man, the man of standards, even though the thing that was supposed to make her his equal was never completed. She is carrying the appetite of an achievement she did not reach.

It would be easy to line these three up and shake my head at them. Many writers do exactly that, and they stop there, satisfied. But I keep noticing what the three have in common, and it is not a flaw in their characters. It is that all three are responding, rationally, to a market that taught them the rules. The first learned that being chosen is a woman’s real work. The second learned that depending on a man is a woman’s real danger. The third learned both lessons and got caught between them. None of these women invented the game. They are playing the one they were handed. And the people who handed it to them were, very often, men.

The word we use for women, and refuse to use for men

And now, there’s the word that floats underneath all of this, rarely spoken but always present: liability. No man, the saying goes, wants to marry a liability. He does not want a woman who brings nothing, costs everything, and cannot hold up her end. And there is a hard truth in it. A marriage is a shared structure, and a partner who only takes weight without ever bearing it will, in time, exhaust the one who carries her. But watch what happens to that word when we turn it around. We apply liability to women with great fluency. We almost never apply it to men, and yet the data, and the lived experience of countless women, say it belongs to a great many of them.

Consider what is actually happening to men in the marriage pool. Across the developed world, men’s real wages are lower today than they were two generations ago, while women have overtaken them in education at almost every level. In country after country, women now earn more degrees than men by wide margins. The sociologist William Julius Wilson gave us the phrase “marriageable men” decades ago to describe a shrinking population of men stable enough to build a household with, and the shortage he described has only deepened. Researchers now document, plainly, that the women most likely to struggle to find an equal are precisely the women who did everything right, because the pool of men matching them has thinned.

Sit with that for a moment, because it reverses the entire script. We talk endlessly about women’s rising standards for men. We say almost nothing about whether the men clear the bar they themselves set. A man who is financially unstable, who has not launched, who cannot offer the maintenance that Islam makes the woman’s right and not his favour, who is emotionally absent and quick to quote verses of obedience he has no intention of earning, is a liability by every measure we use against women. We just simply decline to say so.

So when the second woman builds her own floor and loses interest in being a homemaker, ask the question we usually skip: a homemaker for whom exactly? Built on whose maintenance exactly? Islam did not make the home a woman’s unpaid debt. In the classical fiqh, the financial upkeep of the household, the food, the clothing, the dwelling, is the husband’s binding obligation even if his wife is the richer of the two. The scholars went further: the housework itself was not her religious duty but, when she did it, an act of charity from her. A great deal of what we call a woman’s loss of interest in the home is, on closer inspection, her refusal to subsidise a man who has confused his rights with her labour.

Beauty, and the slow theft it conceals

Allah says in the Qur’an, describing the purpose He placed in marriage, that He created spouses “that you may find tranquillity in them, and He placed between you love and mercy.” Mawaddah wa rahmah. Affection and mercy. A resting place.

Now set that beside how marriage is actually transacted. Most men, when they are honest, marry first for beauty, and it helps the woman’s case enormously if she also carries a strong family name or wealth of her own. This is not a slander against men; it is what they will tell you if you ask them quietly. And women, just as honestly, weigh a man’s resources and standing more heavily than men weigh a woman’s. The research on this is old and consistent across cultures. Men trade in status; women trade in youth and beauty. The whole arrangement is an exchange, and everyone knows the currencies.

Here is what the exchange conceals though: beauty is a wasting asset. The woman who is selected for it is selected for the one thing time is guaranteed to take from her. The man who marries a face is, whether he admits it or not, building his house on the season that fades fastest. And the woman who has been taught that her face is her dowry has been handed a current account that empties a little each year, with no one having told her to build anything that lasts. We praise her for her beauty and call it a compliment. It is closer to a slow theft. And even if it were not a depleting currency, what assures her he will never meet a woman more beautiful sometime. Someday.

Religion, in the Prophet’s list, was the one quality that does the opposite of fade. Character compounds. Faith deepens. The woman, or the man, chosen for deen is chosen for the only asset on the list that is worth more at sixty than at twenty. We have inverted the list precisely backwards, treating the perishable as the prize and the permanent as the bonus.

The families, and the screening they think is Islamic

Now, there is a particular cruelty in how families behave in this market, and it is very much often framed in the clothing of Islam. A woman can be dismissed by a man’s family before she has set foot in the house, judged insignificant because her own family is not established, or her wealth is not enough, or her name carries no weight. The family will tell themselves they are protecting their son, ensuring compatibility, being prudent. They will reach, if pressed, for the language of kafāʾah, the concept of suitability between spouses that the classical jurists discussed at length.

What they will not tell you, because most of them do not know it, is that the strongest position in our tradition cuts directly against them. Imam Malik, and others among the early authorities, held that there is no real kafāʾah except in deen (religion). Not in lineage. Not in wealth. Not in family standing. The Maliki position, in its dominant form, took the very factors these families screen by and set them aside as having no weight in the sight of Allah. Sufyan Ath-Thawri rejected suitability as a binding condition. Al-Hasan Al-Basri did too. They had before them the words of the Prophet ﷺ: “When someone whose religion and character please you comes to you, marry him. If you do not, there will be corruption in the land and great discord.”

Allah says, “The most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.” The Prophet ﷺ said there is no virtue of an Arab over a non-Arab except by taqwa. A family that turns a righteous woman away because her people are not impressive is not practising caution. It is practising the precise tribalism Islam came to dismantle, and it has draped a scholarly word over a thoroughly un-Islamic instinct.

The men who want a wife to be proud of, and three more besides

I have left the men’s categories for their own section, because they deserve the same scrutiny I gave the women, and they very rarely receive it.

There is the man who wants a trophy and offers little. He demands beauty, a strong family, wealth in his wife, and brings to the table no equivalent, neither means nor character nor stability. He applies to women a standard he could not survive being applied to himself.

There is the man who wants a traditional wife while being an untraditional provider. He wants her at home, obedient, quiet, complete in her duties, while he fails the one duty that the whole complementary structure rests upon, which is to provide. He has kept the half of the bargain that serves him and discarded the half that costs him.

There is the man who weaponises the nusus (texts). He has memorised every verse and narration about a wife’s obedience and none about a husband’s kindness, though the Prophet ﷺ said, “The best of you are those who are best to their wives.” He uses his memorization of texts as an instrument of leverage rather than a description of his own obligation.

And there is the man at the centre of a particular Muslim dynamic, the one who wants a wife he can be proud of and intends, all the while, to stack more wives beside her. Here I want to be careful, because polygyny is permitted in our religion and I will not call permitted what Allah has allowed. But I will say what the scholars say.

Allah permitted plurality in the same breath that He attached a condition to it: “…marry of the women who please you, two or three or four. But if you fear you will not be just, then one.” And a few verses later, in the same surah, He says: “You will never be able to deal justly between women, even if you are eager to do so.” The permission and the near-impossibility sit just pages apart and right in the same surah. The classical schools read this carefully. The Shafi’i scholars held that it is better for a man to keep to one even if he believes he can be just. The early modernist scholars looked at how plurality was actually being practised and called much of it an injustice to women and children.

The contemporary scholarship is blunter still about the man in my category. When a man approaches plurality not as a heavy responsibility undertaken for the protection of someone in need, but as a status display, a way to enjoy more while owing each woman less, he has inverted the entire purpose. He has taken a concession that was wrapped in the language of justice and orphans and widows, and converted it into an accessory for his ego. That will not be confused for a man practising his religion. That is a man using his religion as cover for his appetite, and the women he gathers are not honoured by him. They are collected.

What the market cannot price

I have been describing a market, and the language of markets is the language of exchange: assets, currencies, liabilities, returns. It is useful language, because it describes accurately what people are doing. But it describes nothing of what marriage is for.

Allah did not call marriage a transaction. He called it a covenant, meethāqan ghaleedhā, a solemn and weighty covenant. He said spouses are garments for one another, the thing closest to the skin, that covers and warms and conceals. He placed in it tranquillity and mercy. None of these can be acquired. None of them appear on the list of four that the market trades in. They are not what you select a spouse for; they are what you build with a spouse after the selecting is over, and they are available to the plain as readily as the beautiful, to the poor as readily as the rich.

This is the unobvious catastrophe of treating marriage as a market. It is not merely that it is cold, though it is. It is that it prices everything except the things that actually make a marriage, and so it reliably delivers people into unions that have every asset and no mercy. The man gets his beautiful wife of good family and then wonders, a decade in, why his house has no peace. The woman gets her established man of standing and discovers that standing was never going to keep her warm. They both bought exactly what the market told them to want, and the market never stocked the only thing worth having.

The three women I began with, and the four men I set beside them, are not villains. They are people who learned the market’s lessons too well. The tragedy is not that they are even calculating at all. It is that they are calculating in a currency that cannot buy what they actually need, and many of them will not discover this until they are holding the receipt and very much neck-deep into the marriages.

Author’s Not

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This week, Dear Reader, I am not asking you to leave the market, because in some form we all stand in it. I am asking you to notice what it has taught you to want, and to ask whether the Prophet ﷺ would have ranked your wants in the order you have ranked them. He put religion last on the list of what people marry for, and first on the list of what they should. Most of us have memorised the list and ignored the instruction. The question is not whether you can find someone with wealth, or lineage, or beauty. The market is full of them. The question is whether, when those three have done their fading and their failing, there will be anything left in the house that the market never knew how to sell you.

Affirmations are about convincing yourself of something. I am capable. I am enough. I deserve good things. You’re trying to override doubt, to build yourself up, to create confidence where there wasn’t any before. The foundation is you—your belief in yourself, your ability to reshape your thoughts through repetition.

Adhkar work differently. They’re not about building yourself up. They’re about recognizing who Allah is and where you actually stand in relation to Him. The foundation isn’t you. It’s Him. And that makes all the difference.

When you say Subhana Rabbiyal-Adheem in ruku’ for example, you’re not hyping yourself up. It may come off as reassuringif it’s in the facet of tawakkul and knowing Allah. But in this case, let’s assume it’s not. You’re typically saying: Glory to my Lord, the Magnificent. You’re declaring that He is beyond any flaw, any limitation, anything you could compare Him to. You’re small. He’s everything. And you know without a doubt this is true, and not manifestaional.

When you say Hasbunallah wa ni’mal Wakeel, you’re not trying to convince yourself everything will work out. You’re stating a fact that is clear as regards tawheed, which is that Allah is sufficient for us, and He’s the best one to manage our affairs. Whether the situation resolves the way you want or not, His handling of it is better than anything you could’ve done.

When you say La hawla wa la quwwata illa billah, you’re not building inner strength. You’re admitting you don’t have any strength on your own. Every bit of power you have is from Him. That’s not empowering in the self-help sense. It’s just honest. And that honesty is what actually changes you. It is what makes you reach the innerlings of your core and build up tawakkul (reliance on Allah).

Because here’s the thing: affirmations only work if you believe them. If you don’t genuinely think you’re capable or deserving or strong, repeating it might help over time, but the whole structure depends on you generating that belief from within. And when you fail, when circumstances crush you, when your confidence wavers—the affirmation collapses…because it was built on something fragile.

Adhkar, on the other hand, do not collapse. Because they’re not built on you. They’re built on who Allah is. And He doesn’t change based on how you’re feeling today. You can say Alhamdulillah when you’re grateful and everything’s going well. You can also say it when you’re struggling, when nothing makes sense, when you’re barely holding it together. Because Alhamdulillah—all praise is due to Allah—isn’t contingent on your circumstances. It’s a recognition that He’s still worthy of praise, that everything you have is still from Him, even when it doesn’t feel like enough. It is in fact proof that things could have been worse, and that you have it better. Or even to make you realize your own blessings, even in misery.

That’s different from telling yourself “I’m blessed” when you don’t feel blessed. One is you trying to create a feeling. The other is you anchoring yourself to a reality that exists whether you feel it or not.

And this is why understanding what you’re saying actually matters. You can recite Allahu Akbar a hundred times and if you don’t know what it means, it may have little to no effect on you. But when you pause and think about what you’re actually declaring—Allah is greater—greater than your fear, greater than your ambition, greater than the thing you’re obsessing over, greater than the outcome you’re desperate for—it does something to you.

It shrinks everything else down to size. It reminds you that nothing you’re facing is ultimate. That the thing keeping you up at night, the thing consuming your thoughts, the thing you think will make or break you—it’s not bigger than Him. And if it’s not bigger than Him, then it’s not as overwhelming as it feels.

Same with Astaghfirullah. If you’re just saying it because you’re supposed to, it becomes routine. But if you stop and think about what you’re doing—asking the Creator of everything, the One who doesn’t need you at all, to forgive you for the ways you’ve failed Him—and recognizing that He does, again and again, not because you earned it but because He is al-Ghafur, the Oft-Forgiving—that hits different.

It is humbling, and it’s not even in a performative, self-deprecating way. Just in a way that reminds you that you’re not the center. That your mistakes don’t define you as long as you keep turning back. That Allah’s mercy is bigger than whatever you did.

And when you say La ilaha illallah and actually sit with what that means—there is no god but Allah, nothing else is worth ultimate loyalty, ultimate hope, ultimate fear—you start to see how much of your life you’ve been giving to things that don’t deserve it. Career. Reputation. People’s approval. Outcomes you can’t control. Saying La ilaha illa Allah regularly doesn’t just remind you of tawheed as a concept. It trains you to actually live like it’s true. Like Allah is the only one whose judgment matters. Like everything else is secondary.

That’s what the adhkar are doing. They’re not just earning you reward—though they are. They’re not just protecting you—though they do. They’re training your mind to default to the truth. To return to Allah first, not as a last resort.

And that’s the part people miss when they treat adhkar like tools. Like spiritual techniques you pull out when you need something. Yes, the morning and evening adhkar protect you. Yes, certain du’as are answered in specific ways. Yes, there’s immense reward in making dhikr. But if your relationship with these words is purely transactional—I say this so I get that—you’re not engaging with what they’re actually meant to do.

Adhkar aren’t just about asking Allah for things. They’re about knowing Him. Every time you repeat His names, every time you declare His attributes, every time you affirm His oneness—you’re deepening your understanding of who He is. And the more you know Him, the more your trust in Him becomes reflexive. Natural. Unshakable.

That’s tawheed. And it goes beyond just believing Allah exists—every Muslim believes that. But believing He’s enough. That He alone deserves your full reliance. That everything else is secondary. That when you’re anxious, when you’re lost, when you don’t know what to do—He’s the first place you turn, not the last.

And you can’t build that just by thinking about it. You build it by saying it. Over and over. Until it stops being something you have to remind yourself of and starts being the language your heart speaks.

When my anxiety spikes, Hasbunallah wa ni’mal Wakeel comes to mind before the spiral even starts. Not because I’m some elevated spiritual person. Just because I’ve said it enough times that my brain goes there first now. That’s what repetition does. It creates pathways. And when the thing you’re repeating is true—when it reflects reality, not just what you hope is true—those pathways lead somewhere solid. Affirmations try to create reality through belief. Adhkar align you with a reality that already exists. And that’s the difference.

So if you’ve been treating adhkar like affirmations, like tools to boost your mood or fix your mindset, start to think about what you’re actually saying. Think about who you’re saying it to. These aren’t words you came up with to make yourself feel better. These are words the Prophet (SAW) taught you. Words the muslims have been saying for over a thousand years. Words that reflect the nature of reality itself. They’re not here to serve your agenda. They’re here to recalibrate your entire frame.

Again, stop asking what the adhkar can do for you and start asking what they’re teaching you about Allah. Because once you actually understand that, once you believe what you’re saying, the transformation isn’t something you have to work for. It just happens. Because truth, when you align yourself with it, doesn’t leave you the same.

Closing Reflection

This week, Dear Reader, pay attention to the adhkar you say. Do you know what they mean? Do you believe them when you say them? Or are they just sounds, words you hope will protect you without actually anchoring you? The beauty and strength of adhkar isn’t in the repetition alone. It’s in the belief behind them. So learn what you’re saying. Reflect on it. Let it settle. And see how the world looks when what you reach for first isn’t your own strength, but Allah’s.

The Companions were there. They saw it. They were ready to intervene, to discipline this man for his audacity, for his disrespect toward the Nabiyy ﷺ. But the Prophet ﷺ turned to him, smiled, and said, “Give him.” And he gave him what he asked for. This is not the response most of us would choose. And that is the point of this newsletter.

We talk about following the Sunnah. We emphasize imitating the Prophet ﷺ in salah, in fasting, in dress, in daily routines. But when it comes to character—how he responded to disrespect, to harm, to provocation—we become selective. His responses do not always sit well with us. They seem to bypass the urge to correct, to assert, to make a point. In a world that prizes self-assertion, his restraint can feel unfamiliar, perhaps even uncomfortable. But that discomfort says more about us than it does about him.

There is another incident, recorded by the two great imams of Hadith, Al-Imam Bukhari and Muslim, that reflects this same clarity. A man entered the masjid while the Prophet ﷺ was sitting with the Companions, walked to a corner, and began to urinate. Right there, in the masjid. The Companions moved immediately, ready to stop him, to correct him in the moment. The Prophet ﷺ held them back denied them from interrupting him.

They watched, unsettled, as the man finished. Then the Prophet ﷺ ordered that the area be cleaned, and called the man over. He spoke to him calmly, explaining that the masjid is a place for the remembrance of Allah, for prayer, for recitation. The man understood. He left corrected but composed. And from every standpoint you look at it from, the lesson reached him without breaking him.

The difference lies in what is being preserved. A reaction driven by anger often seeks to restore wounded pride. The Prophetic response looks beyond that, asking what will actually lead to good. Sometimes that means delaying correction. Sometimes it means softening the tone. Sometimes it means letting a moment pass without turning it into a confrontation.

This does not erase boundaries, nor does it ignore harm. The Prophet ﷺ was firm when firmness was required. He upheld justice, defended the oppressed, and acted decisively when the situation demanded it. But his responses were never reactions in the raw sense; they were measured, anchored, directed, intentional, purposeful and everything thoughtful. Personal offense did not dictate them.

At Ta’if, when he was rejected and harmed, he got a divine offer that its people be crushed. The Prophet ﷺ, wounded and exhausted, declined. His sight extended beyond the moment, toward what could still emerge from it. He chose to leave the door open for guidance where we would have closed it in anger.

And at the conquest of Makkah, that same vision defined the moment. The Quraysh stood before him after years of hostility—years marked by persecution, loss, and conflict. Power had shifted completely. Yet he asked them what they expected, and when they answered with hope, he granted them freedom. The past did not dictate the response. The future did.

We recognise, in ourselves, a different instinct. When we are wronged, something within us pushes to respond, to make the moment even, to restore a sense of balance. It feels justified, and sometimes it is. That’s undeniable. But often, it is simply immediate. It answers the feeling without questioning it.

The Prophet ﷺ did not move at the pace of impulse. His dignity was not something he needed to defend in every interaction. It remained intact, regardless of how others behaved. That steadiness made restraint possible. It made patience natural. It made overlooking a fault an act of control, and not concession.

So the question shifts. It is no longer about what we are allowed to do when we are wronged, but about what serves the moment best. Some situations call for firmness. Others call for silence. Others require a response that carries both clarity and gentleness. Knowing the difference is part of what we are meant to learn.

And this is not easy. It runs against habits we have built, and expectations we have absorbed. We are taught to react quickly, to guard our image, to respond in kind. Slowing that down requires awareness. Choosing differently requires effort.

But it also builds something steady within you. Each moment of restraint strengthens your hold over yourself. Each measured response sharpens your ability to see beyond the immediate. Over time, that becomes part of your character.

So when the next moment comes—and it will—give yourself that restraint. Let the reaction settle before it forms into action. Ask what the situation actually needs, not just what it provokes in you. Bring to mind the one whose character you claim to follow, and let that guide you.

Because the aim is not to win every exchange or to leave every situation feeling vindicated. The aim is to become someone whose responses carry weight, whose character remains steady, and whose actions reflect a higher standard. And that standard was set by the Prophet ﷺ—quietly, consistently, and often in ways that go against what we would have chosen.

Closing Reflection

This week, in the moments that test you, pay attention to what rises first within you. Let it settle before it becomes action. Consider what response will carry the most good, not just the most relief. Then act from that place. Over time, that pause becomes instinct, and that instinct begins to resemble something far greater than impulse.

Regardless of your answer, there’s a bigger picture I need you to see. It is that this is not just about dating. It is about a pattern. A habit we have developed, as Muslims living in the West or under the influence of Western norms, of adopting frameworks that contradict Islam and then asking Islam to make sense of the contradictions we have created.

We take the structure—the dating culture, the casual gender-mixing, the career idolatry, the interest-based economy, the immodesty dressed up as self-expression—and we keep it intact. We participate in it, normalize it, defend it. And then, when the inevitable conflicts arise, when the cracks start to show, we turn to Islam and ask: How do I make this halal? How do I Islamize this? What is the Islamic ruling on this situation I was never supposed to be in? And the answer, more often than we want to admit, is that the question would not exist if you had followed the Islamic framework from the beginning.

Take the date question for example, it assumes a premise: that unmarried men and women should be spending time alone together, in social settings designed for romantic exploration, with no clear intention of marriage yet, no family involvement, no structure, no accountability. Just two people, figuring out if they vibe, if there is chemistry…if this could go somewhere.

And that entire premise is foreign to Islam. The idea that you casually explore romantic and emotional intimacy with someone outside of a committed, formal process is not part of the Islamic model. The premise Islam lays its foundations on romantic relationships on is that if you are interested in someone for marriage, involve families, have a clear purpose, meet in the presence of a mahram or in a public, dignified setting, and keep the interaction purposeful and brief. There is no dating in that framework. There is getting to know someone with the intention of marriage, within boundaries that protect both parties.

So when you ask, Who pays for the date?, you are asking Islam to solve a problem Islam told you not to create. You have adopted a Western model of courtship—one built on individualism, emotional experimentation, and the idea that you need to test compatibility through prolonged, unsupervised interaction—and now you want Islamic answers to the logistical questions that arise from it. But Islam already gave you an answer. It just was not the one you wanted to hear.

And this pattern shows up everywhere. How do I make my mortgage more Islamic? You are asking how to minimize the harm of riba after you have already committed to it. But Islam did not say, Take interest-based loans and try to make them less bad. It simply said to not take riba. It wants us to avoid it. If that means you rent longer, if that means you save for years, if that means you live more modestly than your peers—so be it. The question of how to Islamize your mortgage is a question born from ignoring the ruling in the first place.

Can I wear tight clothing as long as I cover my hair? You have adopted the aesthetics of modesty—the hijab—but discarded the principle behind it, which includes loose clothing that does not outline the body. And now you are asking if you can keep the cultural symbol while abandoning the substance. And the contradiction will be yours, not Islam’s.

How do we have halal co-ed hangouts? You want the social freedom of gender-mixed spaces but with Islamic boundaries. But Islam already set boundaries: men and women who are not mahram do not casually socialize in private or intimate settings. If there is a need—education, work, necessary interaction—it is done with professionalism and restraint, not as recreational bonding. The question assumes a framework Islam does not endorse.

How do I balance climbing the corporate ladder and being a present mother? You have adopted a value system that says a woman’s worth is measured by her professional success, that she should compete in the marketplace just like men, that staying home is wasting potential. And now you are asking Islam how to make that work when Islam already told you: your primary responsibility, if you choose to have children, is to them. Career is permissible, but it is not the ultimate measure of your value, and it does not override your obligations to your family. The tension you feel is not because Islam is unclear—it is because you are trying to serve two incompatible masters.

Now, do you see the pattern? We adopt the dunya’s premises. We internalize its values. We participate in its systems. And then we ask Islam to make sense of the mess we have created by trying to live in both worlds at once. And here is the thing: Islam is coherent. When you follow its framework from the beginning, these contradictions do not arise. The questions do not need to be asked because the situations do not exist.

If you are not dating, you do not need to figure out who pays. If you are not taking riba, you do not need to figure out how to minimize it. If you are dressing modestly in both form and function, you do not need to parse whether tight clothes with hijab count. If you are maintaining appropriate boundaries between men and women, you do not need elaborate rules for how to have halal mixed gatherings.

The problems we are trying to solve are self-inflicted. We created them by refusing to accept that Islam’s guidance might require us to live differently from the people around us. From the people we’re innately trying to embody.

And this is not about being extreme. This is not about rejecting everything Western or retreating into some imagined past. This is about intellectual honesty. If you say you believe in Islam, if you say the Qur’an is Allah’s guidance and the Prophet ﷺ is the best example, then you have to accept that Islam has a comprehensive framework for how to live. You do not get to pick and choose. You do not get to keep the parts that fit comfortably into modern life and discard the parts that make you stand out.

Either Islam is right about how relationships should be conducted, or it is not. Either Islam is right about modesty, about gender interaction, about financial ethics, about priorities—or it is not.

You do not get to say I believe Islam is true and then live as though the secular liberal framework is also true. Because they are not compatible. They are built on opposing premises. One says your desires, your autonomy, your self-defined identity are ultimate. The other says Allah’s commands are ultimate, and you submit to them whether they align with your preferences or not. Trying to merge the two does not make you balanced. You’ll only get more confused by virtue of it.

So what is the alternative? It is not complicated. It is just different from what you see around you. If you want to get married, you do not date. You express interest—directly, or through family—and you meet in a dignified, structured way. You ask the questions that matter: deen, character, compatibility in values and life goals. You do not need months of emotional entanglement to figure that out. You need clarity, honesty, and the willingness to make a decision without needing to exhaust every variable first.

If you need to make a major purchase, you do not take riba and try to justify it. You save. You seek halal financing if it exists. You delay gratification. You live within your means, even if that means living more modestly than your peers. And by Allah, you’ll find benefit in this, even in your personal growth.

If you are a woman and you want to work, you work—within the boundaries Islam set. You do not prioritize career over your children. You do not adopt a value system that says your worth is in your productivity. You recognize that being a mother, if that is your path, is not a side project. It is a role of immense responsibility and honor, and it does not need to be supplemented by a corporate title to matter.

If you are navigating interactions with the opposite gender, you maintain restraint. You do not create situations where lines blur. You do not cultivate emotional intimacy with someone you are not married to. You do not treat casual conversation, lingering eye contact, private messaging as harmless. You protect your heart and theirs by not playing with fire.

And while these may be a little hard, we must try and we must understand they are not impossible standards. They are just countercultural. And that is what makes them hard. Because living Islamically, in a world that operates on a different set of values, will make you look different. It will make you feel out of step. It will mean saying no to things that everyone else says yes to.

But that is what Islam asks—submission. Not conformity to the dominant culture. Submission to Allah, even when it costs you socially, even when it makes you uncomfortable, even when it requires you to stand alone.

And here is what we need to stop doing: we need to stop pretending that we can have it both ways. That we can live like everyone else and still be firmly grounded in our deen. That we can adopt the frameworks of a secular, liberal society and just sprinkle some Islamic terminology on top to make it halal. It does not work. It never works. The contradictions catch up to you. The questions multiply. The internal tension becomes unbearable. And eventually, you either commit to one framework or the other, because you cannot serve both. So choose.

If you believe Islam is true—if you believe Allah knows better than you, that His guidance is not arbitrary, that the Prophet ﷺ modeled the best way to live—then stop asking Islam to validate the choices you made by ignoring it. Stop trying to retrofit Islamic rulings onto situations Islam told you to avoid. Stop creating problems and then blaming the deen for not having easy answers. The answers exist. You just do not like them. Because they require you to be different. And being different is hard. But it is also the only way forward that is honest.

So, yeah, I’ll ask you again: who is supposed to pay for the date? The answer is simple: you were not supposed to be on the date in the first place. And once you accept that, once you stop trying to Islamize what Islam already rejected, the question disappears. Along with all the others like it. Islam does not need to be bent to fit your life. Your life needs to be shaped by Islam. And the sooner you accept that, the clearer everything becomes.

Author’s Note

Closing Reflection

This week, dear reader, ask yourself: how many of the questions you are asking, how many of the tensions you are navigating, exist because you adopted a framework Islam told you to avoid? And if the answer is uncomfortable—if you realize that much of your confusion comes from trying to merge two opposing systems—what will you do? Will you keep asking Islam to validate choices it already rejected? Or will you finally commit to living by the framework you claim to believe in, even when it makes you different from everyone around you?

Thing is, it is pretty normal to get stuck in this cycle. I didn’t even think about putting this sequel out, but there’s a lot of people having one thought or the other about how this one Ramadan, they feel emptier than ever. And this is why I have decided to try to share what has helped with you, Dear Reader.

You have been fasting, observing salah, doing what you are supposed to do. But still, something feels off. Ramadan used to mean something to you. There were years when the first night felt electric, probably times when standing in taraweeh moved you to tears, when the recitation of the Qur’an settled into your chest like it was speaking directly to you. There were Ramadans when you felt close to Allah, when your du’as felt urgent and alive, when you believed—really believed—that this month could change everything.

But this year, it feels different. Hollow, maybe. Maybe even mechanical. You are going through the motions, but your heart is not in it. You break your fast, you pray, you recite a page or two of Qur’an, and yet none of it touches you the way it used to. You feel distant. Numb. And underneath that numbness is the bare, uncomfortable question: What happened to me? I used to be better than this!

And so, here, there is an hadith of Thawban I’d like to share. The one that describes a state the Prophet ﷺ warned against when he said: “The Prophet (ﷺ) said: The people will soon summon one another to attack you as people when eating invite others to share their dish. Someone asked: Will that be because of our small numbers at that time? He replied: No, you will be numerous at that time: but you will be scum and rubbish like that carried down by a torrent, and Allah will take fear of you from the breasts of your enemy and last enervation into your hearts. Someone asked: What is wahn (enervation). Messenger of Allah (ﷺ): He replied: Love of the world and dislike of death.”

This is wahn. A love of the world that makes you averse to sacrifice. A softness that makes hardship feel unbearable. A creeping attachment to comfort, to ease, to the immediate, that slowly erodes your capacity to endure for the sake of something greater, even if the sacrifice is just for a few days, like Ramadan which is already halfway.

And wahn creeps in into the mind of the muslim. Very discreet. It does not come with a moment of decision where you consciously choose the dunya over the akhirah. It creeps, my friend. It shows up in small concessions—skipping one salah, then another. Delaying repentance because it feels too hard. Choosing entertainment over ‘ibadah because you are tired. Letting the Qur’an gather dust because you will get to it eventually. And over time, those small concessions build into a distance you did not mean to create.

So you arrive at Ramadan, and you expect to feel what you used to feel. But the heart that used to be soft is now a little harder. The passion that used to carry you has dulled. And now you are here, fasting and praying, but feeling like you are outside of it all, watching yourself go through the motions but not truly present.

But there is something else that might be contributing to this disconnection, and it is harder to talk about because it touches a wound many of us relate a little too well to, even if silently. And that is unanswered du’a.

To have been asking Allah for something…perhaps for years. Maybe it is something you need desperately—a job, a spouse, healing, provision, guidance for someone you love. Maybe it is something that feels so right, so aligned with the deen, that you cannot understand why it has not happened yet. You have made du’a in sujud. You have made it in the last third of the night. You have made it during Ramadan, on Fridays, in every moment du’a gets answered. And still, nothing has changed. And so a thought begins to form, in the back of your mind that what is the point?

If Allah is not answering, if all of this worship has not moved the needle, if you are still stuck in the same place you were last Ramadan and the Ramadan before that—then why keep trying? Why keep praying, fasting, making du’a, when it does not seem to matter?

That thought, left unchecked, becomes poison. It turns your ‘ibadah into a transaction, and when the transaction does not deliver, you feel cheated. You feel like you held up your end of the bargain, and Allah did not hold up His. And the distance between you and Him grows.

But that is not how du’a works. And it is not how worship works.

Al-Imam Ibnul Qayyim wrote: “Sometimes Allah withholds what you asked for because He is protecting you from something you cannot see, or preparing you for something better you cannot yet imagine.”

The Prophet ﷺ said that when a Muslim makes du’a, one of three things happens: either Allah gives him what he asks for, or He averts a harm that was coming his way, or He saves that reward for him in the akhirah, where he will wish every du’a had been answered that way.

Again, for a Muslim, every du’a is answered. Not always in the form you wanted. Not always in the timeline you expected. But definitely answered. The job you did not get? Maybe it would have pulled you away from your deen in ways you could not have foreseen. The person you wanted to marry? Maybe the life you would have built together would have broken you in ways you were not ready for. The outcome you prayed for so desperately? Maybe Allah withheld it because He is preparing you for something those who received it are not being prepared for.

You do not have the full picture. You cannot see what Allah sees. And limiting His mercy to whether or not He gave you the specific thing you asked for is a profound misunderstanding of who He is.

We do ourselves a disservice when we measure Allah’s love by how much He gives us in material terms. By how quickly He responds to our wishes. By how closely our lives align with our expectations. That is not how a Muslim thinks.

When you make du’a, you are doing something far more important than just asking for an outcome. You are turning to Allah. You are acknowledging that He is the only one who can help you. You are declaring, with every plea, that you are dependent on Him and that nothing happens except by His will. And that act—that turning—it transforms you, even when the outcome does not match your wish.

In times like this, you realize you pray more than you used to. You remember Allah in moments you would have otherwise forgotten Him. You become someone who, in desperation, reaches for Him instead of drowning in despair. And that, that is growth, even if it does not feel like it.

A person may pray, fast, give sadaqah, make du’a for years—and because the du’a was not answered the way they wanted, they believe all of it was pointless. But what if the point was never just the outcome? What if the point was also who you became in the process of asking?

We do not worship Allah transactionally. We do not serve Him only when He gives us what we want. We worship Him because He is worthy—whether He gives or withholds, whether He answers immediately or delays, whether this life unfolds the way we hoped or completely differently. This is the core of tawheed. This is what it means to submit.

You make du’a for a job, and you do not get it, because something in it would have harmed your deen, your family, your future. You make du’a for something many others want, and you do not get it, because you are being prepared for something they are not ready for. You make du’a, and it remains unanswered for years, because Allah is testing whether you will keep asking when the answer is not immediate—and perhaps, also, because your sins are weighing on you, and He intends to lighten the burden. You do not know. But you are not owed the specific outcome you envisioned. What you are promised is that nothing you did in sincerity was for nothing.

So if you are in Ramadan right now feeling disconnected, feeling like your du’as have gone nowhere, feeling like maybe this whole thing is pointless, hold on, my friend. Hold on and understand that disconnection is neither abandonment, nor is numbness the same as disbelief. You have not lost your place with Allah just because you do not feel what you used to feel. Emotions are unreliable. Commitment is what endures.

And if your du’a has not been answered—if you have been asking for something for years and it still has not come—do not let that kill your motivation. Let it deepen your trust. Let it teach you that Allah’s timeline is not yours, that His wisdom is not yours, that He sees what you do not. Keep making du’a. Make du’a, and make sure it is not just because it guarantees the outcome you want, but because it keeps you tethered to the One who knows what you need better than you do.

There are still nights left in this Ramadan. There are still chances to reconnect, to soften what has hardened, to return to what you have drifted from. Laylatul Qadr has not passed. The doors of mercy and Allah’s forgiveness are still open. And Allah is still listening.

You do not need a grand, emotional breakthrough to be back on track. You just need to keep showing up. Keep fasting. Keep praying. Keep asking, even when it feels like your words are disappearing into silence. Allah hears. And even when He withholds, understand that it is not rejection. Free yourself from the idea that it is because He doesn’t love you. Do yourself one better and think of it as a kind of care you cannot yet comprehend yet. How many a thing have we asked Allah so desperately for and somehow, in the future, we realize He was truly right for not granting us those things.

Your du’as are not wasted. Your ‘ibadah is not pointless. And this Ramadan, even if it feels emptier than the ones before, is still a mercy you were given. Do not let disappointment convince you otherwise.

Closing Reflection

This week, Dear Reader, if Ramadan has felt distant, if your heart has felt numb, if your du’as seem unanswered and your worship feels mechanical, do not despair. Disconnection is not the end. Take it as a signal. A moment to pause and ask if you have been measuring Allah’s mercy by whether He gave you what you wanted, or by the fact that He is still allowing you to ask? That you are still here, still fasting, still turning to Him, even poorly. And that is not nothing. Keep going. Keep asking. The answer may not come the way you expect, but it will come. And in the meantime, let the act of asking be enough to keep you close and connected to Him.

The rows that were full on the first night now have missing spaces. The energy that carried everyone through the first few days has settled into something thinner with less strength. The brothers who were there every night are still there, but many who started strong have stepped back. They just...stopped coming. At first, I thought it was just our masjid that’s like that, but upon consulting with people elsewhere, they feel the same about the numbers too.

And if you are one of the ones still showing up, you have most likely noticed too. You have seen the rows shrink. You have felt the shift. And maybe you have wondered where everyone has gone to.

In Ramadan, the first few nights are easy. There is momentum. There is communal energy. There is something about the newness, the collective intention, the sense that this year will be different that carries you. You show up because the motivation and intent is there, and everyone else is showing up too. You pray taraweeh because the masjid is full and the recitation is beautiful and it feels like you are part of something.

But by day ten, the novelty has worn off. The routine has set in. The initial surge of motivation has faded, and what is left is just the choice: will you keep going, or will you quietly slip back into what is easier?

This newsletter is about people who could be at the masjid but are not. The ones who prayed at the masjid the first week and then decided it was too much effort. The ones who reasoned that praying at home is basically the same. The ones who told themselves they would come back next week, and then next week became the week after, and by the time the last ten nights arrive, they will have spent most of Ramadan praying alone.

The Nabiyy ﷺ said: “The salah of a man in congregation is twenty-seven (in another narration, twenty-five) times more excellent than his prayer at home.” Twenty-seven times! And that is even if he observes it. How about the one who doesn’t? Another narration mentions that standing in taraweeh, behind the imam until he completely rounds up, it is like standing in prayer…all night long! How about the one who just observes his ‘isha, and waits for the next sahur, while filling the time between that with little to no dhikr in the month where that could earn him Allah’s forgiveness.

We can tell ourselves it is the same. We can tell ourselves that what matters is the intention, that Allah sees us wherever you are, that we are still praying and that should be enough. And truly, Allah does see us. It is also true that our salah at home is still valid. But validity is not the same as excellence. Permissibility is not the same as what is best. And the Muslim is known to strive for goodness and ihsan (perfection) when it is attainable.

The masjid is a location for communal acts of worship. It is you standing shoulder to shoulder with your brothers, unified in submission, bearing witness to one another’s commitment, that it may be a hujjah for you on the Day of Qiyaamah. It is the recitation you would not hear at home, the discipline you would not maintain on your own, the accountability that comes from knowing others will notice if you are not there.

And when you choose not to go—when you choose the comfort of your couch, the convenience of your own schedule, the ease of not having to drive or park or stand for an hour—you are opting out of something the Prophet ﷺ said was worth twenty-seven times more than what you are choosing instead, and earning the entire reward for staying up all night long worshipping Allah.

We have to really agree comfort is a terrible guide. If you only do what feels easy, what fits neatly into your routine, what does not require you to push past tiredness or inconvenience, then you will never build anything worth having. You will drift. You will stay exactly where you are. And Ramadan will come and go, year after year, and you will wonder why it never changes you.

But transformation does not happen in comfort. It happens in persistence. It happens when you show up on day ten even though the excitement has faded. It happens when you drive to the masjid even though you are tired, even though it would be easier to stay home, even though no one would blame you if you did. It happens when you choose the harder thing because you know it is the better thing. When you choose the aakhirah over the dunya.

The companions of the Nabiyy ﷺ did not only pray in the masjid when it was convenient. They did not only show up when they felt inspired. They understood that ibaadah is not about how you feel—it is about your responsibilities to Allah and what He has demanded of you. And your responsibility does not decrease just because your motivation has. They also understood the weight of the dunya compared to the aakhirah, and they knew what was worth more. They understood that the time passes, regardless…so why not exhaust yourself in the time you have now.

If you are reading this and you have been one of the ones who stopped coming, this is not to make you feel condemned. This is to make you reconsider. There are still twenty nights left. There is still time to change the trajectory of this Ramadan in your favor. You do not have to remain in the pattern you have fallen into.

Tonight, you can go back. You do not need to explain yourself. You do not need to have a dramatic return. You just show up. You stand in the row. You pray. And tomorrow night, you do it again. Tonight, you make a mental note, and you follow it, and tomorrow, you make sure you do not break the streak.

And if you are one of the ones still going—if you are one of the ones who has been there every night, or most nights, even when it got harder—know that it matters. Know that your presence is not wasted. The masjid may be less full than it was, but you are part of the reason it is not empty. You are holding the line. You are modeling what steadiness looks like. And the reward for that is not small.

Ramadan does not owe you a constant surge of motivation. It does not promise that every night will feel transcendent. What it offers is opportunity—thirty nights where the reward is amplified, where the devils are chained, where the doors of Jannah are open and the gates of Jahannam are closed. What you do with that opportunity is up to you.

You can coast. You can do the bare minimum and tell yourself it is fine because at least you are fasting. Or you can push. You can make the choice, again and again, to show up even when it is not easy. To pray in congregation even when it would be more comfortable to pray alone. To be part of the community even when the crowd has thinned.

The question is not whether you can pray at home. The question is: what are you choosing, and why? This is because the choice you make tonight will shape the choice you make tomorrow. And the pattern you build now will determine whether you finish this Ramadan strong or whether you drift through the rest of it, wondering where the time went. But now, right now, the masjid is still there. The imam is still reciting. The rows are still being formed. And there is still space for you.

Closing Reflection

This week, Dear Reader, if you have found yourself slipping—if the masjid has become less of a priority, if ease has started to win over effort—ask yourself: what am I choosing, and is it truly better? The first ten days are gone. You cannot get them back. But the next twenty are still ahead. And tonight, you can decide whether you will coast through them or whether you will show up, even when it is hard, and let this month do to you what it came to do. May Allah ease you.

But by now, the newness has probably worn off. The first night’s energy has faded. Your body is adjusting to the hunger, but your mind might be adjusting to something else: the awareness that you are more visible now. More deliberate. More committed to something that makes you stand out.

Maybe you are observing salah more than usual. Maybe you are reciting the Qur’an in moments you would normally scroll. Maybe you have pulled back from certain conversations, certain habits, certain spaces that do not serve what you are trying to build this month. And maybe—whether from others or from a voice in your own head—you are hearing the question: Isn’t this a bit much? But I need to tell you, my friend, you still haven’t even done enough.

The entire point of Ramadan is to make you look more devoted. More Allah-conscious. More aligned with what Allah has asked of you. Taqwa is not an invisible, private experience that leaves no trace on how you live. It changes you. It shifts your priorities, your speech, your use of time. It makes you someone who is visibly, undeniably more concerned with pleasing Allah than with blending in. And that is exactly what this month is for.

You are only five or six days in. The fatigue is real. The routine has not yet become easy. The pull to ease up, to coast, to tell yourself that what you have done so far is enough—that pull is natural. But this is the moment that separates those who finish strong from those who drift.

This is because Ramadan does not reward the sprint. It rewards the return. The person who stumbles on day seven and gets back up on day eight. The person who misses tahajjud one night and still sets the alarm the next with conviction to himself that he won’t miss this one. The person who feels their focus slipping and chooses, again, to pull it back.

You do not need to be perfect. You only need to be present. You need to keep showing up, even when it stops feeling special, normal for the time being, even when the discipline required starts to feel heavy. That is when the real work happens. That is when the month does what it came to do—not in the surge of the first few nights, but in the persistence of the middle days when no one is watching and the only thing keeping you going is the fact that you said you would.

If someone suggests you are overdoing it, let them. If someone mocks the fact that you are taking this month seriously, let them. You are not here to perform moderation for an audience. You are here to submit to Allah, and submission looks like devotion. It looks like effort. It looks like someone who has reorganized their life around what matters most.

The Prophet ﷺ said—in an hadith reported by Aisha (radiyallah anha): “The deeds most loved by Allah are those done regularly, even if they are small.”

Regularly. Not spectacularly. Not in one intense burst that burns out by the second week. Regularly. Which means today matters just as much as day one. And tomorrow will matter just as much as today.

So if you woke up this morning and felt the weight of it—the fasting, the salah, the restraint—and wondered if you can keep this up, the answer is yes. And it won’t be because you have unlimited energy. It won’t be because it will get easier. It’ll be because there’ll be newer days, and you can choose, every new day, to do what you have decided to commit to. And then tomorrow, you can choose again.

Ramadan is not asking you to be someone you are not. It is asking you to be who you already said you wanted to be when you testified that there is no god but Allah. It is the affirmation of your iman. It is asking you to live like that testimony is true. And for thirty days, you have the structure, the communal momentum, and the assistance from Allah to do exactly that.

Do not let the dip in motivation convince you that you have failed. Do not let the fatigue make you think you should scale back to something more comfortable. Comfortable is what you do the other eleven months. This month is for push. This month is for becoming someone who does not need to feel inspired in order to follow through.

You are not overdoing it. You are doing what this month was designed for. And every day you continue, every act of worship you return to, every moment you choose Allah over ease—that is you becoming the person Ramadan came to shape. Keep going. The month has not finished with you yet.

Closing Reflection

This week, dear reader, when the voice in your head says this is too much or no one else is doing this or do you think you can sustain this till the end, ask yourself: too much for whom? The goal was never to stay comfortable. The goal was taqwa. The goal was transformation. And transformation requires you to look, feel, and act different than you did before. So let yourself be different. Let this month reshape you. And when the fatigue comes, do not mistake it for failure—it is simply the cost of growth. Go easy on yourself, pick one single act of worship you find very easy, and pack rewards with it. May Allah grant you ease.

Ramadan arrives whether you are ready or not. Whether you spent Sha’ban in consistent worship or barely holding on. Whether your relationship with the Qur’an is intimate or estranged. Whether you feel spiritually alive or like you’ve been running on fumes for months. Ramadan does not wait for you to get your act together first. It comes. And when it does, something shifts in both the seen and the unseen world. And it’s never because we ever earn it, but because Allah, in His mercy, decrees it.

Ramadan is not a month you conquer. It is a month that finds you. And the question is not whether you are worthy of it. The question is whether you will let it do what it came to do, especially within the crevices of our souls.

Let me say something quickly and plainly here: if you are reading this and you do not feel ready for Ramadan, you are not alone. If the thought of fasting feels more like dread than devotion, if you are tired of the cycle of spiritual highs that crash by the second week, if you have tried before and felt like you failed—none of that disqualifies you. In fact, it is exactly why you need this month.

It is important we understand, fundamentally, that Ramadan is not a reward for the spiritually accomplished. It is a mercy for the spiritually exhausted. We have turned Ramadan into performance. Into aesthetics. Into countdowns and food prep and matching prayer outfits and curated iftar tables. There is nothing wrong with joy, beauty, or community. But somewhere beneath the excitement, many of us carry a simmering anxiety of things like, “What if I start strong and fall apart again?”, “What if I don’t feel it this time?”, “What if the spark doesn’t come?”

And that anxiety is never unfounded. It is the voice of someone who has lived through enough Ramadans to know that motivation is not reliable. That the initial surge of energy fades. That by the third week, the Qur’an you intended to finish sits half-read. That the habits you swore would last beyond Ramadan dissolve by Shawwal. Or maybe even struggles to last till the 20th of Ramadan itself.

But here is what that voice within us misunderstands: Ramadan was never meant to run on your motivation. It was meant to run on Allah’s mercy. And mercy does not require you to feel ready. It only requires you to show up. Just show up.

The Companions of the Nabiyy ﷺ and righteous predecessors, may Allah be pleased with them all, used to make du’a for six months before Ramadan that Allah would allow them to reach Ramadan, and then spend six months after it asking Allah to accept what they had done in it. And this is because they understood something we have forgotten: that Ramadan is a gift, not a given. To witness it is a mercy Allah grants only those whom He wills. And the fact that you are here, reading this, means you have been granted another chance, by Allah’s will.

So what do you do with that chance when you do not feel spiritually whole? When your salah feels mechanical, when your heart feels distant, when you are not even sure what you are hoping for anymore? The answer is that you begin where you are—not where you wish you were, not where you were last Ramadan or the Ramadan before that. Where you are, right now, with all your inconsistency and doubt and weariness. You begin there, because that is where Allah meets you.

Allah says in hadeeth qudsi: “I am as My servant thinks I am, and I am with him when he remembers Me. If he remembers Me in himself, I remember him in Myself; and if he remembers Me in a gathering, I remember him in a gathering better than it.” He did not discriminate about the status of His servant’s iman and perhaps say “I am with him when he is spiritually elevated.” Or when he has his life together. Or when he feels deserving. He says: when he remembers Me. That is the threshold. Dhikr. Remembrance. Turning. Showing up, even if poorly.

Ramadan gives you thirty days to remember Allah. Thirty days where the structure is already built for you—fasting to break the autopilot of appetite, taraweeh and tahajjud to reclaim the silence, sweet, beautiful recitation of the Qur’an to recalibrate your internal compass and ponder. You do not have to engineer your own spiritual revival. You simply have to step into what has already been prepared.

However, it is important we be honest about what that stepping in requires. It requires you to stop waiting to feel ready and to start acting as though readiness will come through the doing. It requires you to accept that some days will feel alive, and others will feel like you are simply going through the motions—and that both are acceptable. It requires you to release the fantasy of the perfect Ramadan and embrace the one you are actually capable of actually living, while still hoping to be better.

And this is because many of us resist the truth that consistency matters more than intensity. The salah you show up for, even when your heart gets distracted sometimes in it, is better than the salah you skip while waiting for ikhlas (sincerity) to arrive. The page of the Qur’an you read, even when it does not move you to tears, is still a page closer to completion and one step closer to being better at your relationship with it. The du’a you make, even when you struggle to make yourself believe it will be answered, is still you reaching toward Allah—and that reach is never wasted.

Remember the hadeeth of Aisha (radiyallah ‘anha) where she narrated about the Prophet ﷺ saying: “The deeds most loved by Allah are those done regularly, even if they are small.” It matters less if they’re the most intense or the most emotional when they’re being compared to their regularity. Again, only on that basis: regularity and consistency. The ones you return to, again and again, even when the initial excitement has worn off. That is what reforms you—not the burst of energy in the first few nights, but the sheer faithfulness that persists when the novelty fades.

But let us be clear about what Ramadan is actually for. Allah says in Suratul Baqarah: “O you who have believed, decreed upon you is fasting as it was decreed upon those before you, that you may attain taqwa.”

Taqwa. Consciousness of Allah. Protective awareness. The state of being so mindful of His presence that it shapes your choices before you make them, restrains your hand before you reach, redirects your gaze before you linger. Ramadan is not just about abstaining from food and drink. We all know this, and should not limit it to it alone. Ramadan is about cultivating a heightened, sustained awareness of Allah that rewires how you move through the world. And the entire structure of the month is designed to do exactly that.

You wake for suhoor in the dark, conscious that you are preparing for an act of worship. You fast through the day, and every moment of hunger, every moment of thirst your body demands for water, every moment you abstain from what is normally permissible and reachable to you reminds you that you’re fasting and you’re doing it for the sake of Allah. You break your fast at maghrib, and even that act becomes an occasion to remember Him. To thank Him. You stand in night prayer when your body wants rest, and in that standing you are choosing Him over comfort. You recite and ponder over the Qur’an, and His words are the voice in your head, shaping your thoughts, recalibrating your internal compass.

This is continuous dhikr. It is exactly what we’ve been speaking of—remembrance woven into the rhythm of your day, pulling your attention back to Allah again and again. And the more you engage in that remembrance, the more present He becomes to you. The more present He becomes, the harder it is to fall into the sins you have been struggling with. This is because sin happens in forgetfulness. It happens when Allah is not immediate to you, when His reality has slipped into the background and other voices—desire, impulse, peer pressure, the logic of the moment—move to the foreground as we’ve mentioned in the publication before this. You rationalize. You delay accountability. You tell yourself it is not that serious, or that you will deal with it later, or that just this once will not matter. And in that gap, in that moment of heedlessness, you act in a way you know you should not.

Taqwa closes that gap. It makes the awareness of Allah so constant, so present, that the space for heedlessness shrinks. You are about to speak harshly, and you remember: He hears me. You are about to indulge in something you know is harmful or sinful, and you remember: He sees me. You are about to make a choice out of fear or greed or vanity, and you remember: I will return to Him, and this will be weighed. That is what Ramadan is training you for. The fasting, the prayer, the restraint, the recitation—all of it is dhikr in different forms, all of it is designed to make your consciousness of Allah the default setting, not the exception.

And here is the crucial part: Ramadan does this intensively for thirty days. But taqwa is not meant to be seasonal. It is not meant to peak in Ramadan and then fade by mid-Shawwal. The practices of Ramadan are meant to instill something that you carry forward—a sharpened awareness, a trained reflex, a habit of returning to Allah that does not end when the crescent moon appears again for the commencement of Eid and Shawwal.

Dhikr is how you sustain it. When Ramadan ends and the structure loosens, when the collective energy dissipates and you are back to navigating life without the built-in reminders, dhikr is what keeps your taqwa alive. The morning and evening adhkar, the istighfar throughout the day, the subhanallāh and alhamdulillah and Allahu akbar you repeat in the in-between moments—they are the actual maintenance. They are what ensure that the awareness you cultivated in Ramadan does not get buried again under the noise of the dunya.

So if you enter this Ramadan thinking only about getting through the fasts, about completing the Qur’an, about just getting through taraweeh at the masjid with short surahs—those are good, but they are not the goal. The goal is taqwa. The goal is to become someone who is so habitually aware of Allah that your sins lose their grip, your choices align with His commands, and your heart defaults to Him first, not last. And if you can leave Ramadan with that—even imperfectly, even inconsistently—you will have gained something far more valuable than a completed checklist.

So how do you sustain that when the motivation dwindles? Because it will dwindle. By the second week, the alarm for tahajjud will feel heavier. By the third week, the Qur’an will feel repetitive. By the final ten nights, when everyone around you is surging with renewed energy for Laylatul Qadr, you might feel like you are barely keeping pace.

Here is what helps, by Allah’s grace: anchor yourself to something small and non-negotiable. Don’t make an ambitious list of goals. Don’t make a schedule that requires you to be someone you are not without steps. Start with one thing. Just one. One act of worship that you commit to, no matter what. Maybe it is two rak’ahs after iftar. Maybe it is one page of Qur’an before bed. Maybe it is a specific du’a you repeat every night. Something you can do even on your worst day. Something you find very easy.

That becomes your tether. When everything else falls away—when you miss taraweeh, when you oversleep sahur, when you lose track of your Qur’an progress—you still have that one thing. And that one thing keeps you connected. It reminds you that you have not abandoned the month, even if the month feels like it has moved on without you.

And when you stumble—because you will—do not let shame keep you down. Shaytan’s greatest tool is not the sin itself but the despair that follows it, the voice that tells you it is already ruined, that you have already failed, that there is no point in continuing. That voice is a lie. Keep the reminder to yourself about Allah’s words in Suratu-z-Zumar where He says: “Say, ‘O My servants who have transgressed against themselves, do not despair of the mercy of Allah. Indeed, Allah forgives all sins. Indeed, it is He who is the Forgiving, the Merciful.’”

You can return. You can start again. Not tomorrow. Not next Ramadan. Right now. In the very moment you recognize you have drifted, you can turn back. That turning—that tawbah—is itself an act of worship. It is you saying: I am still here. I still want this. And I am still reaching, Ya Rabb.

Dear Reader, there is a reason Ramadan comes every year. It is not because we master it the first time, or the second, or the tenth. It is because we need to be reminded, again and again, of who we are meant to be. We need the reset. We need the structure. We need the month that finds us, wherever we are, and offers us a way back.

So whether you are entering this Ramadan with excitement or exhaustion, with clarity or confusion, with a full heart or an empty one—know this: you are not too far gone. You are not too inconsistent. You are not disqualified by your past failures or your present doubts. You are here. And that is enough to begin. Ramadan is not asking you to arrive perfect. It is asking you to arrive. Just arrive.

Closing Reflection

This week, Dear Reader, ask yourself: what is the one thing you can commit to this Ramadan, no matter how small? Not the ideal version of yourself. Not the list of ambitions you hope to accomplish. Just one act of worship you can return to, again and again, even on your hardest days. And when the motivation fades—as it will—what will you do to remind yourself that steadiness matters more than intensity, and that Allah’s mercy is vast enough to meet you exactly where you are?

Let’s zoom out a little to our contemporary lives and what’s more native. You wake up in the morning, and before you’ve fully opened your eyes, the voices have already started: “What will they think if I do this?” “What does success look like in their eyes?” “Am I falling behind?” “Should I be further along by now?” The voice of your parents, their unspoken expectations. The voice of your peers, their milestones becoming your measuring stick. The voice of society, its scripts for what someone like you—your age, your gender, your background—is supposed to want, supposed to be, supposed to do.

And beneath all of that, often subtler, sometimes barely audible there’s the voice that asks what Allah wants from you. Not what will impress people. Not what will secure your reputation or your comfort or your place in the social order. Just plainly asking what does He want? What did He create you for? What is He asking of you, right now, in this moment? You may not notice it a lot, but it often creeps in and asks. And oftentimes, because you don’t provide it any reception, it just dips.

That voice exists. It is there in every Muslim, embedded in the shahādah you testified to, woven into the fitrah you were born with. But it competes. And if you do not tend to it, if you do not feed it, like the wolf from earlier, if you do not amplify it and bring it to the surface, it gets buried under everything else. Not erased. Buried. Completely. Pushed down beneath the louder, more persistent voices that the world constantly reinforces. Completely defeated by the wolf you’ve decided to feed, because now, it has more strength. But dhikr, dhikr is what pulls it back up.

When we talk about dhikr—remembrance of Allah—we often frame it as a spiritual practice, something you do to feel close to Allah, to soften the heart, to earn reward. And it is all of those things. But it is also something more fundamental and structural. Dhikr is the mechanism by which your aqeedah—your belief, your creed, your understanding of who Allah is and what He has commanded—moves from the background of your mind to the foreground of your awareness.

Think of it this way: your brain operates on layers of access. Some information is stored deep in long-term memory, retrievable but not immediate. Other information is right at the surface, the first thing you reach for when you need to make a decision or interpret a situation. Dhikr takes your belief in Allah, your commitment to His commands, your awareness of His presence, and moves it from the recesses of your mind into active, accessible consciousness. It makes your īmān the first thing you touch when you encounter the world.

This is why the repetition matters. The takbeer, the tasbeeh, the tahmeed, the tahleel, the istighfār—these are not just words you say out of ritual obligation. In fact, they’re not as enforced as any of the pillars of Islam. But they’re in fact fundamental in strengthening the īmān, which happens to be the first pillar. When you repeat Subhānallāh and pause to consider what it means—that Allah is free from all imperfection, that He is beyond any limitation or flaw you could imagine—you are reinforcing a reality in your mind. When you say Allāhu Akbar and sit with the weight of it—that Allah is greater than anything you fear, anything you desire, anything that competes for your loyalty—you are reorienting yourself.

And this is why understanding the Qur’ān and the adhkār we read, even on salāh, is fundamental. You are training your brain to default to the truth of these words...because the world is constantly training you to default to something else. Every ad you see is teaching you what to want. Every trend you scroll past is shaping what you think is normal. Every conversation, every expectation, every ambient cultural message is subtly calibrating your sense of what matters, what is valuable, what you should be striving for. And most of it has nothing to do with what Allah has asked of you.

If you do not actively counter that, if you do not repeatedly, consciously, deliberately return to the reality of Allah and His commands, then even as a Muslim—even as someone who believes, who prays, who fasts—your actions will be shaped more by the dunya than by your deen. Deen over dunya, huh? You will find yourself making decisions based on what people will think, what feels safe, what aligns with the expectations around you. And you will barely notice it happening, because those voices are everywhere, and the voice of Allah, if you have not been feeding it, is faint.

Dhikr fires up your aqeedah. It takes what you already believe and makes it operational. It transforms abstract theology into lived awareness. But here is the critical point: you need the right aqeedah in the first place for dhikr to ignite anything worth igniting.

If your understanding of Allah is shallow, if your conception of His attributes is vague, if you have never truly reflected on what it means that He is al-’Aleem, al-Baseer, al-Hakeem—all-knowing, all-seeing, all-wise—then your dhikr will lack significant substance. You will say the words, but they will have significant misses in reshaping you. They will likely struggle to cut through the noise you’re trying to silence.

But when your aqeedah is sound, when you have taken the time to know who Allah is, to understand His names and what they demand of you, then dhikr becomes transformative. Every Subhānallāh is a reminder that He is perfect and you are not, that your judgment is limited and His is absolute. Every Alhamdulillāh is a reorientation toward gratitude, a recognition that every good thing in your life is from Him, that your existence itself is a gift you did not earn. Your lā ilāha illallāh is a severing of false loyalties, a declaration that nothing and no one else deserves your ultimate allegiance. This, my friends, is cognitive and spiritual rewiring.

Aishah, may Allah be pleased with her, in an authentic hadith, said that the Prophet ﷺ used to remember Allah at all times. He neither limited dhikr to the obligatory salah, nor did he just adhere to them when things were difficult. At all times. In every situation, in every state, his awareness of Allah was active, present, immediate.

That is what taqwā looks like. Taqwā—consciousness of Allah, protective awareness—is itself a form of dhikr. It is living in a state of remembrance, where your sense of Allah’s presence shapes how you move through the world. Pure Primacy. It is about making sure that when you are faced with a choice, when you are pulled in different directions, the first voice you hear, the first reality you consult, is not what people expect or what society rewards or what feels easy in the moment—but what Allah has made clear.

And you cannot sustain that awareness without deliberate, repeated, conscious return to Him. You cannot expect your īmān to remain sharp and accessible if you are not regularly sharpening it, bringing it back to the surface, feeding it. “And give reminders, for reminders benefit the believers.”

So the question becomes: which wolf are you feeding?

Because you are feeding something. Your attention, your repetition, your mental energy—these are going somewhere. If you spend hours scrolling, absorbing the values and aesthetics and priorities of the algorithm, you are feeding that. If you spend your mental space rehearsing what people might think of you, replaying social dynamics, measuring yourself against others, you are feeding that. If you fill your time with entertainment and distraction and low-level noise, you are feeding that.

And those things will become what you default to. They’ll become things you overthink about when you get into a situation. They will become the lens through which you see yourself and the world. And it won’t be because you chose them consciously, but because you gave them your repetition, your focus, your time. Dhikr is the deliberate choice to feed something else. To give your repetition, your focus, your time to the remembrance of Allah. To make His reality the thing you return to, again and again, until it is no longer something you have to reach for—it is simply where you live.

However, I need to point something out here that this piece is not about retreating from the world. It is not about ignoring responsibilities or rejecting the people around you or pretending that societal context does not matter. You still have parents. You still have peers. You still live in a culture with norms and expectations. And some of those expectations are reasonable, even good. But they are not ultimate. They are not the standard by which your life will be judged. And if they become the loudest voice in your head, the first thing you consult when making decisions, then you have inverted the order. You have made the creation more present to you than the Creator.

Dhikr corrects that inversion, however. It does not erase the other voices, but it subordinates them. It reminds you that yes, you have obligations to people, yes, you live in a social context, yes, you have to navigate the world as it is—but none of that supersedes what Allah has asked of you. None of that gets to define your worth or dictate your choices in a way that contradicts His guidance.

And the more you engage in dhikr—the more you repeat the words, reflect on their meanings, let them settle into your bones—the more natural that hierarchy becomes. You stop needing to consciously fight against the pull of other expectations, because the voice of your deen is no longer something you have to strain to hear. It is right there. It is the first thing. It is foundational.

The world will never stop talking. It will never stop presenting you with images of who you should be, standards you should meet, paths you should follow. And some of those images will be appealing. Some of them will feel urgent. Some of them will come wrapped in the language of success, of responsibility, of self-care, of progress.

And if you are not anchored in dhikr, if you are not constantly returning to the reality of Allah and His commands, you will find yourself shaped by those images more than you realize. You will drift. And the drift will feel natural, because everyone around you is drifting in the same direction.

Dhikr is the anchor. It is the thing that keeps you tethered to what is true, what is eternal, what actually matters. It is the practice that ensures that when the world calls, when the pressures mount, when the voices get loud—you still know which voice to follow.

Closing Reflection

This week, dear reader, pay attention to which voice you hear first when faced with a decision. Ask yourself constantly which wolf you’re feeding when you react to a situation. Is it concern for what people will think? Is it the pressure of meeting expectations? Or is it the awareness of what Allah has asked of you? And if that last voice feels distant, buried beneath everything else, if your wolf seems weak, dying—what will you do to bring it back to the surface?

He walks over to the women and says: “O women, give in charity, for I have seen that you are the majority of the people of Jahannam.” On Eid. Not during a somber Friday khutbah. Not in a private moment of counsel. Not after a tragedy or a trial. On the day of joy, of relief, of communal celebration, he reminded them of Jahannam. He called them to charity, no doubt—but he framed it with a warning they could not ignore.

Now imagine that same scene today. Imagine the social media response. The think pieces. The quote tweets. “This is not how you do da’wah.” “You don’t remind people of Hellfire on Eid.” “Where is the mercy? Where is the wisdom?” “This will only push people away.” We would call it tone-deaf. Harsh. Inappropriate. We would say he should have read the room.

But the room was full of the Sahabah. The best generation. The people who loved him most, who sacrificed everything to follow him. And he did not soften the message to match the mood. He delivered it because it needed to be said, and because love sometimes sounds like a warning.

It then begs the question: when did we decide that Islam should make us comfortable?

Somewhere along the way, we turned da’wah into a performance. Into curated reels and viral clips and feel-good quotes designed to go down easy. We built a celebrity culture around it—where the most popular voices are not necessarily the most grounded in knowledge, but the ones who know how to make Islam sound appealing. Motivational. Smooth. We have learned to package the deen like a lifestyle brand, all inspiration and no confrontation, all Jannah and no Jahannam.

And if someone dares to speak about sin, about consequences, about the reality of accountability to Allah, we accuse them of being harsh. We tell them they do not know our intentions and what we conceal in our chests. We accuse them of lacking wisdom. Of driving people away. As if the Prophet ﷺ himself would pass our standards. As if Allah, in His Book, with its vivid descriptions of punishment and reward, would survive our editorial preferences.

This is not to say that harshness for its own sake is virtuous. It is not. Allah commands us in the Qur’an to speak with wisdom, with kindness, with consideration for people’s circumstances. The Prophet ﷺ was described as mercy to the worlds. He wept for his ummah. He was gentle with the new Muslim, patient with the questioner, compassionate with the struggling. But his gentleness was never the absence of hard truths. And we know this. There is a difference between cruelty and clarity. Between unnecessary harshness and necessary warning. And we have confused the two.

Allah, however, did not shy away from telling us about Jahannam in His Book. Therein, He describes Jahannam in detail—its depth, its heat, its inhabitants, the regret of those who enter it. And it wasn’t to traumatize, but to warn. Because love warns. A father who sees his child walking toward a cliff does not pause to consider whether his tone might be off-putting. He shouts. He grabs. He does whatever it takes to stop the fall.

Allah says in Sūratul Mulk: “When they are thrown into it, they hear from it a dreadful inhaling while it boils up. It almost bursts with rage. Every time a group is thrown into it, its keepers ask them, ‘Did there not come to you a warner?’ They will say, ‘Yes, a warner had come to us, but we denied and said, “Allah has not sent down anything. You are not but in great error.”’”

They were warned. They rejected the warning. And in the hereafter, they will acknowledge that the warning came. The tragedy is not that they were told. The tragedy is that they refused to listen.

So when we sanitize the message—when we strip it of anything that might make people uncomfortable, anything that might challenge their choices, anything that might force them to reckon with their own actions, we risk withholding the full picture, thinking we’re doing them a favor by not letting them battle it out with their nafs. We are acting as though our job is to make Islam palatable, rather than to convey it as it was revealed.

The Prophet ﷺ on Eid day did not say, “O women, you are beautiful and valuable and Allah loves you, so maybe think about charity when you get a chance.” This would have been so sweet of a speech I feel it within me too. Rather, he said, “I have seen that you are the majority of the people of Jahannam.” And then he explained why, and he told them what to do about it. He gave them the warning and the remedy. He did not leave them in despair, but he did not leave them in ignorance either. And that is the Prophetic model. The truth gets delivered with care, warnings get paired with guidance and a remedy or substitute (because it’s already hard neglecting the desires of the heart), and accountability are framed by mercy.

But we have decided that we know better. That we are more sophisticated. That people today are too fragile, too wounded, too far from the deen to handle the full message. And so we reduce Islam to a wellness program. To self-help with Qur’anic aesthetics. To vague encouragement that never actually demands anything of anyone. “Oh, it’s only your intention that matters.”

We forget that the Sahabah were human. That they struggled. That they sinned. That they needed reminders just as we do. And the Prophet ﷺ did not coddle them. He loved them deeply, but he did not protect them from the truth. He trusted them to hear it and act on it. He trusted that they could hold both the promise of Jannah and the warning of Jahannam without falling apart. And they did. They heard, and they obeyed. Are we really so much weaker than they were?

Islam is not an entertainment company. It is not a brand trying to win market share. It is istislam—submission. You conform to it. It does not conform to you. And part of that submission is accepting that the message includes things you do not want to hear. That it will challenge you. That it will confront your habits, your assumptions, your attachments. That it will remind you of realities you would rather ignore.

And this is the beauty of its comprehensiveness. Its completion. A message that only speaks of reward and never of consequence is incomplete. A da’wah that only comforts and never confronts is a distortion. And so, in His Book, Allah balances hope and fear, mercy and justice, Jannah and Jahannam. And so must we.

This does not mean every conversation must be a fire-and-brimstone sermon. Really, no. It does not mean we ignore context, or wisdom, or the reality that people are at different stages in their journey. The Prophet ﷺ met people where they were. He was gentle with the Bedouin who urinated in the masjid. He was patient with the man who wanted permission to commit zina and walked him through why it was harmful. He understood that different people need different approaches.

But he never hid the truth to make someone feel better. He never pretended that sin had no consequences. He never adjusted the deen to suit people’s comfort. And neither should we.

We live in an age where people want Islam to validate them, not transform them. Where they want a religion that affirms their choices rather than challenges them. Where the role of the da’ee has become to make people feel good about their relationship with Allah, even when that relationship is barely functioning. But really true mercy tells you the truth, even when it stings. True compassion, none comparable to Allah’s, warns you of the cliff before you fall off it. True love refuses to flatter you into destruction.

The Prophet ﷺ loved the women he addressed on Eid. And because he loved them, he warned them. He did not wait for a better moment. He did not sugarcoat the message. He spoke plainly, because their souls were at stake, and politeness is not more important than salvation.

If we truly care about people, we will do the same. We will stop measuring da’wah by how well it is received and start measuring it by whether it was truthful. What we can do to that, however, is putting that truth with wisdom. We will stop prioritizing comfort over clarity. We will stop pretending that we are doing people a service by withholding the parts of Islam that make them uncomfortable…because the question is not whether the message will displease people. The question is whether it reflects what Allah revealed and what the Prophet ﷺ conveyed. And if it does, then it is not ours to edit.

Closing Reflection

This week, dear reader, ask yourself: have you mistaken comfort for compassion? Have you curated a version of Islam that affirms you without ever confronting you? And if someone were to speak to you the way the Prophet ﷺ spoke to the Sahabah—with clarity, with honesty, with both mercy and warning—would you receive it as guidance, or would you dismiss it as harshness? The message has not changed, my friends. The question is whether we are still willing to hear it.

Would it be arrogance to trust that map? Or would the arrogance be in refusing it, insisting instead that your own best guess is just as valid?

This is not a perfect analogy, but it gestures toward something essential: the difference between human speculation and wahy (divine revelation). When a Muslim speaks with certainty about Jannah and Jahannam, about what awaits us beyond death, it is not because we claim to have reasoned our way into the unseen. It is because we believe we were told—by the One who is not bound by death, who authored existence itself, and who sent a messenger we trust. And that distinction matters.

There is a particular kind of intellectual humility that refuses to accept any answer it did not arrive at independently. It is admirable in many ways. It resists manipulation. It guards against charlatans. It insists that belief should not be outsourced to authority without scrutiny. Islam does not oppose this instinct. In fact, it affirms something deeper: that human beings, relying solely on their own faculties—perception, memory, reason, hope, fear—cannot pierce the veil of death. We are not equipped for it.

Allah says in Sūratul Isrā: “And they ask you about the soul. Say, ‘The soul is of the affair of my Lord. And mankind have not been given of knowledge except a little.’”

It is not that the question is being somewhat evaded. It is that Islam does not pretend that human intelligence, unaided, can unlock metaphysical certainty. It agrees that we are finite, that our tools are limited, that the unseen remains unseen to us—unless it is shown.

So when a Muslim says, “I know Jannah is real,”, or something like “in Jannah or on the Day of Reckoning,” they are not claiming personal omniscience. They are claiming something else entirely regarding the One who is omniscient told us, through a man whose life bore witness to the truth of what he carried.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was known as Al-Ameen—the Trustworthy—long before revelation descended upon him. His people entrusted him with their wealth, their secrets, their honor. When he began to speak of the unseen, of angels and resurrection and Allah’s judgment, those who knew him best had to reckon with a man who had never lied, never deceived, never sought power or wealth. His message cost him everything. Out went the window, his reputation, his safety, his comfort. He was offered kingship, riches, compromise. He refused. He lived simply. He died with little. And he never wavered in what he conveyed.

This is not proof in the empirical sense—faith does not work that way. But it is evidence in the human sense. When someone you know to be honest tells you something beyond your ability to verify, you weigh their character, their consistency, their motive. The Prophet’s ﷺ life was the living argument for his message. His character was the envelope in which revelation arrived.

And the message itself—the Qur’an—has been preserved, word for word, letter for letter, in a way no other ancient text has. It invites scrutiny. It challenges its doubters to produce something like it. It appeals to reason, to observation, to the natural world, to human psychology. It does not demand blind obedience. It demands reflection. And the Qur’an makes sure to reflect this. In fact, the origin of the word, the Qur’an, is literally to read. The Qur’an, by Allah’s might, demands a challenge, intellectualism.

Allah says in Sūratul Baqarah: “And if you are in doubt about what We have sent down upon Our Servant, then produce a sūrah the like thereof and call upon your witnesses other than Allah, if you should be truthful.”

This is not the language of someone hiding from questions. This is not how they’d sound, and it is clear. Obvious. This is the language of confidence—not human arrogance, but the confidence that comes from truth.

So when a Muslim speaks of Jannah and Jahannam with certainty, it is not because they have figured it out. It is because they trust the source. They trust that the Creator who brought them into existence, who sustains every breath, who designed the complexity of the cell and the orbit of stars, would not leave His creation without guidance. They trust that revelation is not an insult to human intelligence but a completion of it.

We all wake up inside the same mystery, yes. But Islam says we are not left to improvise in the dark. We have been given a map—not one we drew, but one we were handed. And the question is not whether it feels presumptuous to trust it. The question is whether it would be reasonable to expect such a map in the first place, and whether the one offering it is trustworthy.

Islam invites you to examine that question. Islam invites you to honor it enough to pursue it fully. It doesn’t intend to silence your doubts in any way; it wants to answer those questions. This is because certainty, in Islam, is not the enemy of humility. It is humility’s fruit. To say “I do not know” is honest. To say “I cannot know, and therefore no one can” is a different claim entirely—one that closes the door to revelation before even considering whether it knocked.

Author’s Note

Closing Reflection

This week, dear reader, ask yourself: what would it mean if the map were real? Not hypothetically, but personally. What would change if you truly believed that your life is not an improvisation against the abyss, but a journey with a known destination? And if you already believe—do you live as though the destination shapes the direction?

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.

Concise ‘Ilm is growing. What began as reflections on iman has always been more—thoughts on life, language, longing, society, and the interior world we rarely articulate. I’m leaning into that now…in addition to what we had before, anyway.

Going forward, this space will still speak Islam clearly and unapologetically. It will also hold essays on life, introspection, literature, poetry, romance, and the everyday questions that shape who we are becoming. Iman will remain the compass, and humanity will be the terrain and playground for us.

Thank you for reading, thinking, and growing alongside me. May Allah ease you and us.

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakātuh.

The Noble Beginning

No one can deny that the world has wronged women in countless ways. From unpaid labor to abuse and objectification, history bears witness to imbalance. Feminism, in its earliest form, sought to repair these cracks—to call for justice, safety, and dignity. These are goals every believing heart can agree with.

But where Islam brings correction through revelation, feminism seeks correction through rebellion. And over time, it evolved from protecting women to equalizing them with men in every domain—biologically, spiritually, socially, even economically. It began to blur the divine lines of difference, seeing roles as limitations instead of balance.

Equality or Equity?

Islam does not teach that men and women are the same; it teaches that they are complementary, not competitive. And Allah jalla wa ‘alā acknowledges this difference to preserve harmony and prevent any sort of demeaning taunts. Allah says:

“And the male is not like the female.” (Āl ʿImrān 3:36)

“Men are protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means.” (An-Nisā’ 4:34)

In this, Allah establishes that our worth is not measured by sameness, but by righteousness. The Prophet ﷺ said:

“Women are the twin halves of men.” (Abū Dāwūd)

They are halves—each completing the other, not clones of one another.

Feminism, however, argues that identical opportunity equals justice. But justice in Islam lies in each fulfilling the role designed by Allah. That is equity—measured by need, wisdom, and capacity—not arbitrary sameness.

The Trial of Understanding

A Muslimah who carries both the banner of īmān and the ideology of feminism faces an inevitable storm. At some point, she must confront verses that challenge the foundation of that ideology.

She might read about inheritance:

“Allah commands you concerning your children: for the male, what is equal to the share of two females...” (An-Nisā’ 4:11)

Or witness:

“And bring to witness two witnesses from among your men. And if there are not two men, then a man and two women...” (Al-Baqarah 2:282)

To a heart trained by modern thought, these verses may sound unjust. But to a heart anchored in tawḥīd, they are signs of divine justice that transcends human intellect.

Allah, in His wisdom, did not make these distinctions out of preference, but out of purpose. Inheritance, for instance, is tied to financial responsibility. A man’s share is double not for privilege, but because his obligation to provide is lifelong. As for witness, it reflects not intelligence but circumstance—men being more exposed to certain transactions and public affairs in the early social fabric of humanity. These are not eternal hierarchies of worth, but contextual laws of justice rooted in the grand, infinite wisdom of Allah.

The Depth Many Miss

The real tragedy is that many who debate these verses have not studied them. They haven’t spent nights under teachers or labored over tafsīr. Instead, they echo opinions shaped by social frustration, not spiritual education.

And yes, men’s negligence has made this easier. Many of them have failed to live up to that honorable and divine standard. They have neglected duties, broken trusts, and left gaps and cracks that movements like feminism conveniently fill. When husbands, fathers, and brothers fail to uphold the mercy and care Islam enjoins, they hand the microphone to ideologies waiting to exploit that pain.

But here’s the thing: the failure of men does not justify the rejection of the balance Allah created. Our reaction to negligence cannot be rebellion; it must be return. A Muslimah’s empowerment lies in fulfilling what Allah has honored her with, not in mirroring men. To lean on their neglect as reason to rebel against divine structure is to fall into the very trap the modern world sets—one that equates liberation with defiance.

And perhaps this is why, in many circles today, feminism has grown into something beyond the pursuit of fairness. It has, in many cases as we have now, birthed quiet resentment toward men—misandry cloaked as empowerment. The frustration that once sought understanding has turned into disdain, and the energy once meant to seek justice now fuels rivalry.

The Honor of Distinction

In Islam, womanhood is a divine distinction, not an afterthought. The Prophet ﷺ said:

“Whoever has three daughters and is patient with them, feeds them, gives them drink, and clothes them from his wealth—they will be a shield for him from the Fire.” (Ahmad)

And he ﷺ said:

“The best of you are the best to your wives.” (Tirmidhī)

These ahādīth are foundational! They remind us that dignity in Islam is not found in competition but in compassion; not in claiming sameness, but in celebrating a natural indisputable difference.

Where True Liberation Lies

The modern call for “breaking limits” is seductive because it sounds empowering. But Islam’s liberation lies in istislām, surrender—surrendering to Allah’s knowledge that our limits are what protect us. Feminism promises freedom from boundaries; Islam gives freedom through them.

It is not weakness to accept what Allah has decreed—it is the highest form of strength. The Muslimah who understands this knows that she is not missing out by being different. She is living exactly as Allah intended—balanced, purposeful, honored.

This week, Dear Reader:
Reflect on where your sense of value comes from. Do you seek it from Allah’s design or the world’s definition? When you find a verse that challenges your worldview, do you wrestle with it—or try to understand the wisdom behind it? The peace of a believer lies not in rewriting revelation, but in trusting that Allah has already written what is best for us.

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakātuh.

The world is obsessed with labels—race, ethnicity, nationality, culture. Yet none of these truly bind hearts. You can share skin color with someone and still feel worlds apart. But with īmān, the distance of oceans collapses in an instant. You can land in a country whose language you do not know, walk into a masjid, and suddenly you are home. This bond of belief is not an abstract idea; it is Allah’s design, more natural than blood and more lasting than heritage. In this reflection, we explore how Islam dissolves barriers and gives us one group identity—the Ummah—built not on color or tribe, but on taqwā.

A World of Divides

Humanity has always searched for belonging. We form groups by tribe, nation, race, profession, even hobbies. Yet history shows that these identities often sow more division than unity. Wars have been fought because of land and language. Families have split over politics. Even today, racial pride and nationalism continue to fragment societies.

Allah says in the Qur’an:

“O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may ˹get to˺ know one another. Surely the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous among you. Allah is truly All-Knowing, All-Aware.” (Al-Ḥujurāt 49:13)

The purpose of diversity, Allah reminds us, is not superiority, but recognition. The only real measure of worth is taqwā. Skin, tongue, or passport may introduce us to each other, but only īmān binds us.

The Brotherhood of Belief

When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah, one of his first acts was to pair each Muhājir (migrant from Makkah) with an Anṣārī (host from Madinah). Unrelated by blood, culture or history, but now, then, bonded in īmān. They shared homes, wealth, responsibilities, and even gave up some of their wives to their pair-companion! An unheard-of level of solidarity between two distinct groups.

The Prophet ﷺ said:

“The believer to the believer is like a building whose parts strengthen one another.” (Bukhārī, Muslim)

That kind of strength does not come from shared language or shared blood…or any linkage of that sort you may want to think of. It comes from a shared Rabb, a shared Rasul, and a shared Kitāb. A shared īmān.

Beyond Borders and Bloodlines

You can share a skin color with millions and yet be strangers. You can speak the same tongue as a neighbor and have nothing in common with them. But meet a Muslim from across the world—someone whose upbringing, culture, and language are nothing like yours—and you instantly share salāh, greeting, and love for Allah and His Prophet ﷺ.

This is why Islam rejects identities rooted in arrogance. The Prophet ﷺ said in his Farewell Sermon:

“All mankind is from Adam and Eve. An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab; a white has no superiority over a black, nor a black over a white—except by taqwā.” (Ahmad)

The message was timeless: dignity comes not from tribe, but from īmān and īmān alone. And how lost is the one without it?

The Modern Mirror

Even in our times, the reality is evident. Step into the ḥaram in Makkah or Madinah. You will see an African reciting the Qur’an next to an Asian, a Turk beside a European, all bowing in rhythm. No other identity in the world can dissolve barriers so naturally.

And you may have experienced this yourself: traveling abroad, meeting a Muslim stranger, and instantly sharing warmth as though you had known each other for years. The tasleem carries more weight than the passport. The shared love of Allah outweighs bloodlines.

But herein lies a warning too. When Muslims forget this singular identity, they fall into the same traps as the world—tribalism, racism, nationalism. Communities split along ethnic lines, masājid divide by language, and sometimes, we even carry cultural prejudices into marriage decisions. These divisions betray the very spirit of our dīn.

A Compass for Our Hearts

Our shared belief is not only about solidarity; it is a compass for our loyalties. Allah says:

“The believers are but brothers, so make peace between your brothers. And be mindful of Allah so you may be shown mercy.” (Al-Ḥujurāt 49:10)

Brotherhood in Islam is not theoretical—it is actionable. It demands that we care for each other’s needs, defend each other’s honor, and mend ties when they are broken. It demands that our first allegiance is to Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, and then to those who believe.

And just like in the time of the Prophet ﷺ, this bond remains revolutionary. It challenges racism, nationalism, and the shallow groupings that society idolizes. It teaches us that the believer is never truly alone, no matter where he goes.

Living the Identity of īmān

So, Dear Reader, we must ask ourselves: what identity defines us most? Is it our flag, our tribe, our race? Or is it our faith? If you were stripped of your nationality tomorrow, would you still know exactly who you are?

Our heroes are not celebrities or monarchs; they are the Prophets, the ṣaḥābah, the righteous of the Ummah. Our common culture is Qur’an and Sunnah. Our anthem is the adhan. Our loyalty is to Allah first, His Messenger ﷺ, and then to the community of believers worldwide.

And the beauty of this identity is that it never expires. Nations rise and fall, languages evolve and die, but īmān—if Allah wills—remains with till certainty (death) arrives, and on the Day you are raised.

This week, Dear Reader:
Reflect on your primary identity. When you think of who you are, is “Muslim” the first word that comes to your heart? Do your daily actions show loyalty to this Ummah above all other groupings? And if you were asked to prove your brotherhood in faith—through time, wealth, or sacrifice—what would your answer be?

Assalāmu ʿalaykum wa raḥmatullāhi wa barakātuh.

Is Stinginess Just About Wealth?

When we think of stinginess, we often imagine someone holding tightly to their wealth, completely refusing to part with them. But Allah jalla wa ‘ala teaches us that stinginess exceeds the thought of wealth itself, and resonates even closely with trust. It is about whether we believe that giving for Allah’s sake will diminish us, or whether we truly believe that the One who owns the heavens and the earth can replace everything we give.

Allah says in Suratus Sabai:

“And whatever you spend in charity, He will compensate ˹you˺ for it. For He is the Best Provider.” (34:39)

And in Suratul Baqarah, he says:

“Shayṭān threatens you with poverty and commands you to immorality, while Allah promises you forgiveness from Him and bounty. And Allah is all-Encompassing, All-Knowing.” (2:268)

Every act of withholding is tied to a hidden whisper, a sneering thought from within the subconscious that: “If I give, I will lose. If I share, I will be left with less.” But tawakkul—the deep reliance on Allah—dismantles this fear. It says: “My Rabb provides, not my wallet. My security lies in His decree, not in my hoarding.”

The Connection Between Reliance and Generosity

In truth, everything we give was never ours. It was placed in our hands as a test: will we treat it as a trust, or will we clutch it as if we were its creators?

This is why Allah pairs ṣalāh and zakāh so often in the Qur’an. In Tafsīr as-Saʿdī of Imam Abdurrahman As-Sa’di, Sūratul Bayyinah, verse 5, he writes that Allah mentions prayer and zakāh explicitly, even though they fall under “worshiping Allah with sincere devotion,” because of their immense virtue and because whoever establishes them establishes all other deeds. Prayer perfects one’s relationship with Allah. Zakāh perfects one’s relationship with people. Together, they root out the two diseases of the soul: heedlessness and miserliness.

Verses That Expose the Heart

Allah describes the stingy person not just as withholding wealth, but as forgetting Allah’s promise:

“And do not let those who ˹greedily˺ withhold Allah’s bounties think it is good for them—in fact, it is bad for them! They will be leashed ˹by their necks˺ on the Day of Judgment with whatever ˹wealth˺ they used to withhold. And Allah is the ˹sole˺ inheritor of the heavens and the earth. And Allah is All-Aware of what you do.” (3:180)

Notice how Allah concludes: “To Allah belongs the heritage of the heavens and the earth.” In other words—what you think you “saved” was never yours to begin with. To cling too tightly is to deny tawḥīd in its practical form.

In contrast, those who trust Allah and give are painted as people of birr (true righteousness):

“Righteousness is not in turning your faces towards the east or the west. Rather, the righteous are those who believe in Allah, the Last Day, the angels, the Books, and the prophets; who give charity out of their cherished wealth to relatives, orphans, the poor, ˹needy˺ travellers, beggars, and for freeing captives; who establish prayer, pay alms-tax, and keep the pledges they make; and who are patient in times of suffering, adversity, and in ˹the heat of˺ battle. It is they who are true ˹in faith˺, and it is they who are mindful ˹of Allah˺.” (2:177)

The righteous feel the pull of attachment to wealth—they “love it”—but they still give. Why? Because their trust shifts from what sits in their hand to what lies with their Lord.

The Spiritual Root of Stinginess

Imām Ibn al-Qayyim once noted that the disease of miserliness is not cured by more money, but by more yaqīn (certainty). A man with millions may still fear poverty more than a man with little. The sickness is not in the hand but in the heart.

This is why the Prophet ﷺ warned:

“Beware of stinginess, for it destroyed those before you. It incited them to shed blood and make lawful what was unlawful.” (Muslim)

When trust in Allah is severed, stinginess breeds fear, and fear breeds injustice. But when tawakkul takes root, generosity flows—and with it, contentment.

The Test of Our Reliance

Think about this: the command to give zakāh is not just limited to financial regulation or economic sustenance—it is a purification. It purifies the wealth, but more importantly, it purifies the heart from shackles of fear and attachment.

And think about ṣalāh: five times a day we declare Allāhu akbar—Allah is the greatest. But what is the value of that declaration if, when asked to part with wealth, we act as if money is greater?

Stinginess reveals the cracks in our tawakkul. Generosity reveals its strength.

This Week, Dear Reader:

Ask yourself: When I hesitate to give—whether to family, to charity, or to a cause of good—what holds me back? Is it love of the wealth itself, or is it fear that if I give, I will have less?

And if it is fear, then is that not a sign that my heart has forgotten the Lord who says: “Whatever you spend, He will replace it”?

Stinginess is not conquered by force. It is conquered by remembering that Allah is Ar-Razzāq, the Provider, whose treasures never deplete. To trust Him fully is to give freely.

May Allah expand our chests, purify our hearts from miserliness, and grant us tawakkul so deep that giving feels like the honor that it is, not a loss.

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakātuh.

From Jahiliyyah to Islam’s Honor

Before Islam, the Arabs of Jahiliyyah treated women as mere possessions. A daughter could be buried alive for the simple fact of being female. Wives were inherited like property, and their consent or dignity was of little concern. In that world, the Qur’an descended like light into darkness:

“Do not kill your children out of poverty. We provide for you and them.” (6:151)

“And do not inherit women against their will, nor mistreat them to take back what you have given them...” (4:19)

The Qur’an shattered jahiliyyah customs. The Prophet ﷺ reminded men: “The best of you are those who are best to their wives, and I am the best of you to my wives.” (Tirmidhi). He told us that daughters, once seen as shame, are in fact a means to Jannah if raised with kindness. Reflecting over these words, we realize a mental shift a—revolution of honor and responsibility.

How We Lost the Balance

Yet, centuries later, we find ourselves echoing traces of Jahiliyyah in new clothes. We do not bury our women when they’re still babies, we keep them alive to make them go through worse by burying their worth. And this worth, we do not carry it our by ordinarily silencing their voices originally; we do it when we treat them as ornaments, commodities, or objects of status. And sadly, much of this comes from men—not even strangers, but often friends we laugh with, circles we keep, and cultures we allow to shape us.

It starts with subtle jokes about women’s worth, shape and style. It grows in how we dismiss their concerns as “drama”, “hormone overdose” or “weakness.” It deepens in how some men feel more pride in impressing strangers than in caring for their own wives and daughters. And when women tire of this cycle, when they are spoken of like burdens instead of blessings, the void is filled by voices who say: “fight back, reject tradition, reject Islam.” Thus, the soil for many isms—feminism as a case study—was fertilized by Muslims who abandoned their duty.

A Reflection of Taqwa

The way you see women is not just a social question—it is innate and reflective of the fear of Allah within us. Do you see them as a test of your strength, or as an amanah from Allah? Do you measure yourself by how many you can attract, or by how much you honor the one entrusted to you?

The Prophet ﷺ said: “A dinar you spend in the way of Allah, a dinar you spend freeing a slave, a dinar you give in charity to the poor, and a dinar you spend on your family—the greatest of them is the one you spend on your family.” (Muslim).

Notice the scale. Charity is noble, freeing a slave is monumental, but spending with love and responsibility on your wife and children surpasses it all. That is because in honoring women, you honor the very core of society. A woman nurtures generations. Neglect her, objectify her, or oppress her—and you wound generations.

The modern world tells us women are free when they reveal more of themselves, or when they abandon their roles as nurturers. But this is just another form of objectification—making their worth dependent on how they look, or how much they can resemble men.

As Muslim men, we must rise above these shallow metrics. Our standard is taqwa, not trends. Our measure is how the Prophet ﷺ smiled at his wives, how he stood for his daughter Fatimah, how he never dismissed their words or reduced their worth.

And even if a man does not see honoring women as a privilege (though it is), he must at least fear Allah regarding them. Because Allah reminds us in the Qur’an, saying: “Indeed, Allah commands justice and good conduct...” (16:90).

When women are honored as Allah and His Messenger commanded, the society flourishes. When they are reduced to objects, the society fractures. The rise of harmful ideologies is not solved by louder debates, but by living the example of Islam with dignity and mercy. The Prophet ﷺ did not need a movement to defend women—he needed men who feared Allah enough to treat them as worthy in humanity, blessings in the home, and mothers of the future.

This week, Dear Reader:
Take a moment to ask yourself: If my treatment of women—whether wife, mother, sister, daughter, or colleague—were placed before Allah today, would I feel secure? Or would I feel ashamed? This answer, in its barest form, will reveal the state of your taqwa to you.

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakātuh.

The Issue

A lot of Muslims today have pledged their loyalty—albeit cluelessly—to individuals, models, artistes, politicians and personalities that critically influence their iman and hence servitude to Allah. Humans like them.

They have increased themselves in an irredeemable love and obsession with the lives of people who mirror Islam in no way. They stand up in their defense whenever an opposition is against them (for the sake of this love), they condemn these oppositions and are unwavering in filling their socials with posts which are clear indicators of their allegiance. Humans like them.

This subtle and hidden internal affair, like iman itself—which is in the heart, manifests in our actions eventually and weakens the strength of our taqwa (God-consciousness). And this has become an easy passage for Shaytan to explore the heedlessness of the Son of Adam.

The Consequence

But eventually, there is a moment waiting for all of us—when the world has passed away, when the sun has folded, when the last breath has been taken and the books have been sealed. On that day, Allah will grant us one final gift: the company of those we truly loved in life and spent that much of our time endorsing—subtly or overtly.

The Prophet ﷺ once told a man—in the presence of Abdullah bn Mas’ud, “A man will be with those whom he loves.” Abdullah and every companion exemplified this. For these great predecessors of ours, this was not a passing statement of any kind at all. They had it on them as compass for their hearts. I mean, two critical examples we could learn so much from were those of Suhaib and Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with them both).

Suhaib Ar-Rumi (رضي الله عنه) left Makkah with belief in Allah. The Quraysh intercepted him on his way to Madinah, threatening to strip him of his wealth. Without hesitation, he offered every coin he had in exchange for freedom to join the Prophet ﷺ. When he arrived, weary and empty-handed, the Prophet ﷺ greeted him saying, “Your trade has profited, O Abu Yahya. Your trade has profited.”

It was a trade without loss! Dunya for ākhirah. Temporary comfort for eternal gain. Ephemeral for eternity.

Then there was Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه). During the battle of Badr, his own son—still a disbeliever—fought on the opposing side. After his son later embraced Islam, he confessed to Abu Bakr that he had once spared him on the battlefield when he had the chance to strike. Abu Bakr’s reply was simple and unflinching: “If I had seen you then, I would not have spared you.” It was not cruelty, even in the least. That was clarity untapped! The love of Allah and His Messenger ﷺ stood above even the dearest of blood ties for them.

This, this kind of love, it is not the language of hearts chained to the dunya. It is not a language you chain to fallible humans who have excesses and inadequacies. But today, our compass has shifted. We claim to love the Prophet ﷺ, but our admiration tilts toward celebrities, influencers, politicians and the fleeting glimmer of trends. We wear their slogans, speak their language, mimic their lifestyles—until their values become ours. “This doesn’t fit into the trend. This is not how so-and-so wore it on his grand tour.”

We are aware of their births and birthrights, we learn their languages, created a path on their dreams like it’s our lives ourselves when we do not even know the name of the son of Imam Ash Shaafi’i because we never even studied the life of Imam, to begin with. The Prophet ﷺ warned us: a person will be with the one they love. And love shapes likeness. Love shapes interests. What are your interests?

Allah tells us in the Qur’an:

"You will never find a people who truly believe in Allah and the Last Day loyal to those who defy Allah and His Messenger, even if they were their parents, children, siblings, or extended family…" (Al-Mujādilah 58:22)

To love Allah and His Messenger ﷺ is not a claim on the tongue alone. If you love Allah, you make sure to let it reflect in your actions, just as you make sure your lover that inspires a good poetry in you reads a most-enthralling of those poetries from you with a smile on them. The love of Allah is a choice, proven by what we are willing to lose for it. What are you willing to lose for Allah—now, and when push comes to shove?

The poet said:

أحِبُّ الصَّالِحِينَ وَلَسْتُ مِنْهُمْ
لَعَلِّي أَنْ أَنَالَ بِهِمْ شَفَاعَةْ

“I love the righteous, though I am not among them
perhaps through them I will gain intercession.”

Love righteous people. Defend them. Yearn to walk their path. Because on the Day when the world is gone, on the Day when it will matter the most, that love will be Allah’s final gift to you—the company of those whose love you take to Him.

This week, Dear Reader:

• measure your love: in your time, in your money, in your conversations—is it Allah and His Messenger ﷺ you are investing in, or is it the dunya?

• ask your heart: Who do I truly admire most? Would I want to stand beside them on the Day of Judgement?

• if you were told, “You will be with those you love,” who comes to mind first? That answer reveals your true direction.

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakātuh.

The Issue

During one of the last ten days of Ramadān, I was on my way back home with two of my friends after I had gone to observe tarāweeh at the masjid I was scheduled for. After they got in the car, we decided to buy snacks from a popular place around.

Being an academic environment, it is only normal that you’ll come across different people at different instances. As we stepped down from the car to move in, we couldn’t miss two ladies who passed by us. Two to three steps later, one of my friends commented, saying: “Wallah, there are beautiful women in this world!” Our third friend who had also noticed same acknowledged that with an equal excitement and validation as if he was waiting for someone to say it.

We got our orders and just as we were about to leave, two other ladies passed by us again, trying to make their way in this time. Oh, dear! My friends wouldn’t keep quiet about these two, too. “Wallah, Allah really created beautiful women in this world!”, “Oh my God! Beautiful women are endless in this world. Wow!” The comments flew and wouldn't stop as we moved into the car.

As we made our way out of the school environment, I asked away into the air, “Are these the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen in your lives?” They barely remember their faces, but I knew the thrill was still very much in them. And so is the case of every haram with us all.

The truth is, we had quite the discussion as we drove home that day. And while in that state, we all came to the conclusion that no matter who you’ve got as a partner, there will always be someone seemingly better. It is seemingly because there's always goodness in people, especially those we've chosen and that have chosen us. If you prioritize looks, there will be someone better-looking sometime to make you rethink and remake your choice. Will you restrain that temptation as Allah commanded?

The Consequences

These are the daily choices we have to keep on making, time and again, especially when you get married to someone you chose yourself. You have to keep choosing the beauty you see in them every new day, even when someone that’s not yours glamorizes themselves more to your eyes, out in the world on some glistening sunset.

It is why it is easier to accept that Allah’s directive to us to lower our gazes is in fact not out of punishment—despite how much beauty there is in this world. The directive of Allah on us to lower our gazes is a directive for our own protection and the protection of our own spouses and partners. The moment we start getting exposed to newer dimensions and seeing things we can’t have, the golds we have and own, right with us, start to wane in value, and that is usually very hard to realize until too late.

Allah says in Suratu Nur, verse 30:

Tell the believing men to lower their gaze (from looking at forbidden things), and protect their private parts (from illegal sexual acts). That is purer for them. Verily, Allâh is All-Aware of what they do.

Having to stare and making the eyes wander about events, scenes and thoughts by ordinarily looking at the opposite gender for arousal is not the glamour that anyone may think it is. It kills the body’s yearn for those who truly deserve it, and sexual appeal and any other fantasy are only a tip of the iceberg for what relationships between a man and a woman demand in order to foster.

The moment we build our relationships on just all of that, what happens when we go outside and because of our unsettling eyes and wandering gazes, we start to subtly discard or lose catch of the glamour of our beautiful partners that we once coveted and now have at our beck and call. This perspective was recently well-illustrated in a beautiful thread of one of my most admired twitter mutuals when he wrote: “Imagine, for a moment, the value of innocence. Not ignorance, but the kind of purity that allows you to truly *see* someone, rather than compare them to an endless stream of digital alternatives. Imagine the power of unfamiliarity, of not being desensitized.”

The Cure

The affliction of staring intensely at the opposite gender without control, especially as a man is a trial. It is an affliction. And that has interestingly been made easier by mobile devices serving as online brothels. It is enough a jihad of the inner self to fight against having to stare and have thoughts at the image of women unlawful to one, as this is one of the leading causes of lack of concentration on salāh.

And there are many cures for this from the sunnah, among which are to:

• Befriend beneficial companions. Look into the obvious affairs of your companions and contemplate on how they motivate you towards these actions. You will find some answers in that.

• Lower the gaze, even if you don’t want to. The truth about any new beauty you see is that an even more better one is ahead somewhere. But if you suppress the arousing desire in you to look one more time, you tame yourself and become almost uninterested by the time the greater fitnah strikes!

• Repeat your istighfār when you find your eyes wandering, and your heart being receptive to the thoughts. The effect of dhikr in suppressing fitnah is truly unmatched, because fitnah like these are whispers of shaytan, and shaytan doesn’t thrive in the presence of dhikr. When you find yourself slacking, remember Allah and seek for His help-and He is most reliable of

• Seek Allah’s help. No effort of ours is enough to help us through anything except by the permission of Allah. You have to realize your own helplessness in the situation that you are in and ask Allah for help through it. May Allah grant us safety.

Remember, the glamour and the beauties of the dunya never end. Beautiful men are endless, and so are charming and exquisite women. But your preservation for the one beauty you’re eventually going to own, and the extent and strength of your bond to the new discoveries you’ll have together is dependent on the little actions and gestures that manifest when you stare, store and expose yourself to the endless images of beauties you can’t pack in your hands. What’s the point of saving unnecessary pictures on your phone to stare at and imagine in your head? Preserve yourself, Beloved, and Allah will grant you the sweetness of your preservation, Bi Idhnillah!

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakātuh.

If you walk up to ten random Muslims today and ask them three of their biggest aspirations, there’s every likelihood that there will be more inclination towards aspirations that are only limited to the dunya than to the akhirah. I mean, personally, in the notes and aspirations we’ve written down, have we ever really sat down to consider what is beyond these goals? Some of us may say yes; most of us, oftentimes and in fact mask it behind and intent of “I’m doing it because of Allah first, and then…” But are you? In truth, are you, really?

But most of these inclinations of our dreams and aspirations are not blame-worthy. No, they’re not. Not at the start of them. It is the likelihood of the actions and inactions they eventually impose on us, by virtue of a missed crucial foundation, that makes tending uncontrollably to such inclinations very dangerous for our īmān.

The reality of living our aspirations on any of these never really becomes clear until too late, apparently. And we know too well the distractions of the world can be undoubtedly very sulking. Hence, in no time, a person finds himself completely living the life he desires, as opposed to the life Allah desires.

But we may have a few people come to us and say something like, “Are you rather not making people do things they’re not willing to do? Don’t you find it rather confusing and compelling on them?” No, it’s neither of the two situations. The truth is that this is why the Tawheed is the bedrock of learning Islam. And whoever learns Allah has created an easy way for himself to worship Him (by His permission).

The psyche of actually moving and basing all our dreams and aspirations majorly on the worldly affairs has now affected us so much so that our actions now have little to no synergy with our preparations for the ākhirah. We toil so hard for many right ends but with the wrong intentions. And with the wrong intent, an act is only doomed to fail. A man takes bribes to increase his wealth so he could take care of his family. Another seeks to attain some high social position so they can ‘help others’, but it gets mixed up with their growing desire to be adored and worshipped.

The truth is that we have so much made our goals, satisfactions and successes only measurable by the values of the dunya. A latest car, an illustrious career, a big house, an overflowing bank account, a loving spouse are the successes of the dunya. And all of these are good, no doubt! For most, usually and apparently, not much afterwards matters. And hence, all their thoughts, morning and night, are on how any of these get bigger and closer to actualization.

For most, and in fact, anything that paves the way towards these successes can be overlooked in the long run. We don’t mind jumping a few lines, transgressing Allah’s limits for a little exchange towards such successes. We don’t mind taking off the hijāb for the greater good, or free-mixing with the opposite gender in just one event—as long as it is for the “greater good.”

But the truth is, the greater good gets redefined. Sometimes, it is to save a misappropriation and harm in the society; other times, it is our own selfish intentions pushing us in order to raise our social status. But where does it end? Where do we draw the limits?

And so Allah asks us, “Then where are you going?” This is where we are—earth, created with a purpose well-outlined by His numerous messengers; the most noble of them being Rasūlullah ﷺ. Where are we going, striving so hard and relentlessly beyond the limits of the messages we’ve been sent through the Messenger ﷺ?

Where are we going, and what do we seek so much so that we sideline the Sunnah? Why waste all of life to just all the luxury that it has within itself, compared to all the beauty that is promised to come after it in the akhirah? What gives so much that makes us disregard Allah for the little temporary chips that come as rewards from Shaytān in the dunya?

And so Allah says in Sūratu-d-Duhā (v. 4-5): “And indeed the Hereafter is better for you than the present (life of this world). And verily, your Lord will give you (all good) so that you shall be well-pleased.”

If you really want what is to come, delay the immediate gratification that this dunya offers—a gratification that ends with the glorification of people and remains only words of mouth after a few years. After all, it all ends in this dunya. Comfort yourself with the temporary nature of all that there is, except Allah—The Giver and Creator of them all!

In an authentic hadīth narrated by Anas radiyallah ‘anh in Jami’ At-Tirmidhi, The Prophet ﷺ said: “Whoever makes the Hereafter his goal, Allah makes his heart rich, and organizes his affairs, and the world comes to him whether it wants to or not. And whoever makes the world his goal, Allah puts his poverty right before his eyes, and disorganizes his affairs, and the world does not come to him, except what has been decreed for him.”

A good illustration of such person described in the hadīth above will be one so invested in their dunya. A sure result of this is anxiety because they definitely won't be so much reliant on Allah as expected. They'd be so invested in increasing their wealth and will factor Allah in just little of it. Due to this much anxiety, they'd barely have time for Allah, struggle with their acts of worship, and put so much focus on their worldly success. And because there are so many like him, it creates a ‘healthy competition’. But man is never sufficient with however much he gets, is he? He wants more! And the more he acquires, the more he feels to spend to elevate his status, as the status so demands.

The most honorable of things we can do for ourselves, however, is to comply and stay within the limits of Allah. If anything in provision will ever be ours, by Allah, it will be! And if it never comes, striving so hard, carelessly and consciously trading haram for what inevitably ends in this dunya is an unwise trade. Khasārah!

This end is very much a message to all those who are always so impressed, admire and worship the lives of successful people like sportsmen, actors and other multimillionaires and billionaires of the dunya: you're a Muslim—an honored one with a purpose, a guide and a role model in the Nabiyy ﷺ. The moment you so adore and worship anyone else's values beyond the values Islam has placed in your hands, you're sure to start missing the path. Be mindful of Allah, and Allah will protect (and guide) you.

In your du’ā, too, ask Allah for the goodness of His worship and your steadfastness upon His servitude. The Prophet ﷺ taught us to say:

اللهم أعني على ذكرك، وشكرك، وحسن عبادتك

“Allahumma a'innī ‘alā dhikrika, wa shukrika, wa husni 'ibādatik (O Allah, help me remember You, to be grateful to You, and to worship You in an excellent manner).”

Do not be among those He described when He said in Sūratul Baqarah (v. 200): “But of mankind there are some who say: Our Lord! Give us (Your Bounties) in this world! and for such there will be no portion in the Hereafter.”

This is a call to action, Dear Reader. Evaluate your wants, look into your heart, sincerely, and delicately assess the aspirations you have within you. May Allah keep you and me steadfast upon haqq and ease us.