By AbuBakr Karolia

Ebrahim Moosa, “Gaza and Muslim Political Theology: Three Meditations on Justice, Extermination, and the Humanitarian Order,” Political Theology, 2026. This review by AbuBakr Karolia responds to the academic journal article and not to the shorter Substack version I circulated on Substack.

Introduction

Few contemporary questions demand deeper theological and moral reflection than the relationship between justice, political power, human dignity, and the lived experience of oppressed peoples. In “Gaza and Muslim Political Theology: Three Meditations on Justice, Extermination, and the Humanitarian Order,” Ebrahim Moosa offers an intellectually ambitious contribution to debates concerning Muslim political theology, justice, dehumanization, and the limits of the humanitarian order.

Although Gaza provides the immediate point of departure, Moosa’s argument extends well beyond the Palestinian question. He examines how political systems determine whose suffering receives recognition, whose humanity is protected, and whose lives become vulnerable to abandonment. The distinction between humanitarian compassion and genuine justice consequently becomes one of the article’s central concerns. Humanitarianism may alleviate suffering, but justice requires confronting the political and structural conditions that produce it.

One of the article’s principal strengths is its ability to bring theology, history, philosophy, ethics, and politics into a single conversation. Qurʾānic ethics, the Prophetic example, classical Islamic scholarship, and modern Muslim thought are placed in dialogue with contemporary theories of power, decolonial critique, and the intellectual history surrounding the figure of the Muselmann.

The result is not simply a critique of the international order. Moosa seeks to recover an Islamic moral vocabulary through which political authority, public responsibility, human dignity, and justice can be reconsidered.

The Muselmann and the Genealogy of Dehumanization

The most original and provocative aspect of the article is Moosa’s treatment of the figure of the Muselmann. It is also the area that, in my view, requires the greatest degree of historical and conceptual precision.

The term Muselmann acquired a particular meaning within the Nazi concentration camp system. It described prisoners who, through starvation, exhaustion, illness, and systematic degradation, had reached a condition of extreme physical and psychological debilitation. The figure later acquired considerable significance in Holocaust testimony and scholarship, particularly through Primo Levi’s reflections and the subsequent philosophical engagement of Giorgio Agamben (Levi, 1988; Agamben, 1999).

The genealogy of the term therefore cannot be separated from the Holocaust, the concentration camp system, and the experience of prisoners, including Jews, subjected to Nazi persecution and exterminatory conditions. At the same time, Muselmann acquired a wider philosophical significance as a figure through which scholars have considered the destruction of human agency, dignity, political recognition, and subjectivity under extreme conditions of domination.

Moosa enters this literature aware of that complexity. His argument does not depend upon a straightforward transplantation of a European Holocaust category into contemporary Muslim experience. Rather, he draws upon the historical and philosophical significance of the Muselmann to ask whether the mechanisms associated with dehumanization and political abandonment can illuminate contemporary Muslim and Palestinian vulnerability.

This distinction is fundamental.

Moosa does not, as I understand the argument, claim that the historical experience of Jews under Nazism and the contemporary experience of Palestinians or Muslims are identical. Rather, the Muselmann functions as a conceptual lens through which recurring mechanisms of exclusion, abandonment, and dehumanization can be examined across different historical circumstances.

The intellectual genealogy matters here. Levi’s reflections on the figure of the Muselmann and Agamben’s subsequent philosophical interpretation place Moosa’s argument within a substantial body of scholarship concerning testimony, the limits of representation, bare life, and the destruction of human agency (Levi, 1988; Agamben, 1999).

Moosa’s contribution is therefore best understood not as an isolated analogy but as an intervention in an existing debate. His use of the Muselmann asks whether a figure emerging from a specific historical catastrophe can also illuminate recurring political mechanisms without erasing the specificity of the original experience.

This is a powerful question. It is also one that requires careful boundaries.

The movement from the historical Muselmann to its contemporary conceptual application would, in my view, benefit from being made even more explicit. The reader should be able to distinguish clearly between the historical emergence of the term within the concentration camp system, its treatment in Jewish testimony and Holocaust scholarship, its philosophical reinterpretation by Agamben and others, and Moosa’s own conceptual deployment of it in relation to Muslim and Palestinian vulnerability.

Such clarification would strengthen rather than weaken the argument.

Historical analogy is most persuasive when it establishes both resemblance and difference. Its purpose is to illuminate recurring mechanisms without suggesting that distinct historical experiences are interchangeable. In this respect, the conceptual force of the Muselmann does not require an equivalence between the Holocaust and contemporary Palestinian suffering. Its intellectual value may in fact depend upon preserving that distinction.

The important question therefore becomes whether particular mechanisms of dehumanization can recur across radically different political and historical circumstances: the erosion of agency, the denial of political recognition, the normalization of suffering, the abandonment of vulnerable populations, and the transformation of human beings into lives that become increasingly disposable.

Read in this way, Moosa’s use of the Muselmann is less a claim of historical equivalence than an invitation to examine the conditions under which human beings become politically invisible.

Talal Asad, Power, and the Contemporary Muslim Condition

This argument connects naturally with Moosa’s engagement with Talal Asad. Asad’s scholarship has shown how categories such as religion, secularism, citizenship, security, and public order are shaped by historical relations of power rather than functioning as neutral categories (Asad, 2003).

Moosa draws upon this insight to examine how Muslims are frequently encountered through categories of security, surveillance, suspicion, and political management rather than through the language of equal citizenship and human dignity.

Gaza consequently becomes both a specific political tragedy and a broader lens through which questions of political recognition, exclusion, and humanitarianism can be examined.

Importantly, Moosa does not reduce Muslim experience to one universal condition. Muslims live under profoundly different political circumstances. Occupation, war, authoritarian governance, Islamophobia, discrimination, and political exclusion cannot be treated as identical experiences.

The strength of Moosa’s approach lies instead in identifying recurring structures while recognizing that those structures assume different forms in different contexts. This distinction is essential to any serious comparative political theology.

Recovering an Islamic Political Theology of Justice

The article’s constructive dimension is equally important. Moosa does not end with a critique of Western political power, Zionism, authoritarianism, or the humanitarian order. He turns toward Islamic intellectual resources capable of articulating an alternative moral framework.

The Qurʾānic concepts of ʿadl (justice), tawḥīd, and maṣlaḥa provide important elements of this framework. Justice appears not as a secondary political virtue but as a fundamental moral obligation governing both individual conduct and public life.

The Prophetic model develops this vision further by connecting ethical leadership with accountability, the protection of the vulnerable, and the preservation of human dignity. The resulting political theology does not become a simple opposition between Muslims and the West. Its deeper principle is justice against domination, regardless of who exercises power.

Moosa’s engagement with classical scholars such as al-Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyya similarly demonstrates that questions of political legitimacy, public welfare, and moral responsibility have long occupied Muslim thought. Their relevance for contemporary politics lies less in providing ready-made constitutional models than in offering ethical principles by which modern political institutions may be evaluated.

The discussion of ʿAlī Sharīʿatī and Karbalāʾ extends this framework from the ethics of governance to the ethics of resistance. Karbalāʾ becomes an enduring moral symbol of the refusal to legitimize injustice, while Sharīʿatī provides a modern vocabulary through which Islamic faith can become a source of ethical and social transformation.

Together, these strands enable Moosa to construct a political theology that is neither confined to private spirituality nor reduced to political ideology. Justice, accountability, resistance, compassion, and public responsibility become interconnected dimensions of a broader Islamic ethical project.

Critical Reflections

The article’s principal achievement lies in its ability to bring several intellectual traditions into conversation without reducing the discussion to theology, politics, or philosophy alone. It asks how Islamic political theology might contribute to a world in which humanitarian language increasingly coexists with political abandonment.

The article is particularly persuasive in distinguishing between humanitarian relief and justice. Alleviating suffering is necessary, but it does not address the structures through which suffering is produced. Moosa’s insistence upon this distinction gives the article much of its moral and political force.

The principal area where further clarification would strengthen the argument remains the Muselmann.

The question is not simply whether the comparison is permissible. Comparisons of this kind can be intellectually productive. The more important question is this: what precisely is being carried from the historical figure of the Muselmann into the contemporary analysis of politics?

Is it the historical condition itself? The destruction of agency? Political abandonment? The production of disposable life? Or the broader philosophical problem of how human beings can be reduced to a condition in which their suffering no longer commands adequate political or moral recognition?

Making that distinction more explicit would help prevent an interpretation that Moosa does not appear to intend: that the Holocaust experience of Jews and contemporary Palestinian or Muslim experience are historically interchangeable.

The strength of the comparison does not require such equivalence. On the contrary, its value may lie precisely in identifying recurring mechanisms while preserving the irreducible specificity of each historical experience.

This is not a minor semantic issue. It concerns the methodology of historical analogy itself. How can one historical catastrophe illuminate another without universalizing the first or reducing the second to it? Moosa’s article opens this difficult question and, in doing so, creates an important opportunity for further scholarship.

Conclusion

“Gaza and Muslim Political Theology” deserves serious scholarly engagement because it moves beyond an interpretation of Gaza toward broader questions of justice, political responsibility, human dignity, and the moral vocation of Islamic thought.

Its engagement with the Muselmann is among its most original contributions. Its significance, in my reading, lies not in asserting historical equivalence between the Holocaust and contemporary Palestinian suffering, but in asking whether mechanisms of dehumanization, abandonment, and political disposability can recur across different historical circumstances.

For that reason, the Muselmann discussion should not be regarded simply as a vulnerability in Moosa’s argument. It is rather the point at which further historical and conceptual clarification could make an already provocative argument considerably stronger. Greater explicitness about the genealogy of the term, its treatment by Levi and Agamben, and the movement from its Holocaust context toward contemporary Muslim and Palestinian vulnerability would preserve historical specificity while sharpening the article’s wider ethical claim.

Ultimately, the article leaves the reader with questions that extend beyond Gaza. How should justice be understood when humanitarianism fails? How can Islamic political theology respond to contemporary structures of power without becoming merely reactive? And how can historical memory illuminate present suffering without collapsing distinct histories into one another?

These are difficult questions, but they are precisely what makes Moosa’s contribution worthy of sustained discussion.

I offer these reflections with appreciation for the seriousness and intellectual courage of the project, and in the hope that they contribute to the wider scholarly conversation the article seeks to advance.

References

Agamben, G. (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books.

Asad, T. (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Levi, P. (1988) The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage International.

Moosa, E. (2026) ‘Gaza and Muslim Political Theology: Three Meditations on Justice, Extermination, and the Humanitarian Order’, Political Theology. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2026.2691443

About the Author

Abu Karolia holds an MA from the University of Johannesburg and is a long-standing community activist, civic thinker, and faith-based organizer. He is a founding member of the Movement for a United South Africa (MUSA), a transformative consciousness movement committed to socio-economic justice, ethical governance, and national renewal. abkarolia@telkomsa.net

A Note from Ebrahim Moosa

I will not immediately reply to AbuBakr Karolia’s reflections. His reading of my article documented here deserves the attention of readers at this stage. I would rather invite other voices to join the conversation, instead closing it off by my rejoinder and response. Readers who wish to join this symposium on “Gaza and Muslim Political Theology” are warmly invited to write to me, sharing their views and limiting it to 2,000 words or less. As they come in, I will space out the publication of the responses, if there are any, in the weeks ahead, hoping thereby to generate a productive conversation in symposium format. It will also give me time to think more carefully about the above and other questions that might arise out of this symposiu

m.

Every generation imagines that it knows what injustice looks like—until history invents a form that exceeds its moral vocabulary.

Gaza has been such a moment.

For much of my academic life I have tried to balance the urgency of political events with the dictates of the pace of thought. Scholarship requires patience. Ideas ripen slowly; they ask to be cultivated before they are proclaimed.

But there are moments when history refuses to wait for scholarship.

For nearly two years the world watched Israel destroy Gaza while the very institutions established after the Second World War to prevent such destruction proved unable—or unwilling—to interrupt it. Governments expressed humanitarian concern and continued to supply the weapons. Courts deliberated. Diplomats negotiated. The dead were counted, and counted again, until the counting itself began to resemble a substitute for action.

What unsettled me was not only Israel’s conduct. It is a tyrannical regime that Palestinians have known since the Western powers recognized that settler-colonial entity. It was the astonishing ease with which the moral architecture of the contemporary world adapted itself to that conduct. A genocide could unfold in real time, on our screens, in daylight, while much of the international order went on speaking in the measured cadences of restraint, proportionality, and diplomatic balance.

Something deeper than politics was at work.

Gaza was exposing more than the failure of international institutions. It was exposing the limits of the moral imagination on which those institutions rest. The crisis was not only juridical. It was theological. Beyond imagination is the shameful involvement of some Muslim majority states in a military and political alliance with Israel. The theological implications of this unfathomable crime, is an issue I will address separately in a forthcoming Substack Letter from the Dihlīz. For now my views are summarized in this post and my Open Access article can be read in Political Theology.

The conclusion I arrived at surprised me. For decades my work has revolved around Islamic thought, ethics, law, and the formation of the moral self. I did not imagine these preoccupations would one day converge on Gaza.

But perhaps they always pointed in that direction. Ideas have biographies. They travel with us long before we recognize where they are taking us.

Mine did not begin in Palestine. They began in a bookshop in Bombay, and then, unexpectedly, in South Africa.

II. Justice Has a Longer Memory Than Politics

I was seventeen when I bought a translation of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn (Revivification of the Sciences of Religion) in Bombay, now Mumbai. Ghazālī is one of the most influential scholars in all of Muslim civilization. I can still see the red volume I carried back to my room. Most of the book lay well beyond me; I read with more hope than comprehension. But books are patient companions, and what Ghazālī eventually taught me was not a body of doctrine. It was that knowledge becomes transformative only when it reshapes the one who holds it. Learning is a discipline of perception. One studies in order to see differently.

That lesson took a long detour before it came due. Before the University of Cape Town, Stanford, Duke, or Notre Dame, I had another education, and it took place in the streets of Cape Town. As a political journalist during the final years of apartheid, I learned that history rarely arrives as an abstraction. It arrives as smoke, sirens, funerals, and mothers whose language has grown too exhausted for tears. Reporting on resistance was not the gathering of facts. It was an apprenticeship in witnessing.

Among the many funerals I covered, one has stayed with me with unusual clarity.

In September 1985 I attended the burial of Ebrahim Carelse, a young man from Salt River killed by the security forces. Mourning dissolved into chaos when someone recognized an undercover policeman in the crowd. The officer fired, wounding a mourner, and an enraged crowd descended on him.

Then something happened that I have never forgotten. My friend, the scholar Farid Esack, threw himself over the man, using his own body as a shield against the fury of the crowd.

Forty years later the image has not faded—not because it offered an easy moral lesson, but because it refused one. The policeman served an unjust system. The mourners carried legitimate rage. Farid’s intervention erased neither truth. It simply insisted that justice must not become indistinguishable from vengeance.

I recall arriving at a scene on March 3, 1986 in the township of Gugulethu. I saw the bodies of six African National Congress resistance fighters at a distance, alleged to have been ambushed and executed by the security forces of the apartheid regime. Their crime? Fighting to take back their land, their country and their lives from the racist colonial settler regime, known as apartheid.

Justice, I began to see, is never merely distributive. It is also formative. It shapes the kind of human beings we become while pursuing it.

Two years later, in May 1988, I traveled to Soweto with a Muslim delegation to a gathering convened by the World Conference on Religion and Peace. The venue was Regina Mundi Church, already woven into the history of the struggle. Christian leaders had assembled to discuss the Kairos Document—one of the most remarkable theological interventions produced against apartheid—and had invited Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists to reflect with them on faith and liberation.

I arrived believing I was attending a conference. In retrospect, I was attending an education.

One afternoon our car broke down after Friday prayers, and we found ourselves walking back through the township without a guide. The air carried the coal smoke that hangs over Soweto in winter, and mingled with it something less tangible. This was the era of “necklacing,” when suspected collaborators were burned alive inside gasoline-soaked tires. Groups of young men tracked us as we walked. One member of our delegation, trying to relieve his own anxiety, muttered: “Burning tire, funeral pyre.”

I asked him immediately to stop. There are moments when words deepen danger rather than relieve it.

We walked the rest of the way in silence and reached the rectory safely. But that walk has never left me. Memory has its own way of refusing closure.

It was at that meeting that I put a question to my Christian hosts that I have never stopped turning over. What incentive, I asked, did P. W. Botha—a devout Christian and an architect of apartheid—have to rule justly, if he understood himself to be justified by faith, and Christ’s redemptive work as already accomplished and sufficient? They replied that Botha had failed to conform to the image of Christ; he had not taken up his cross.

It was a serious answer, and I came to appreciate the theological depth behind it. But I left with an unease that took me decades to name. In a moral grammar where salvation is bound tightly to accountability, to law and works and repair, the question of what makes earthly justice structurally binding does not go away. Is justice a voluntary response of gratitude, or an obligation with teeth?

That question, asked in a church in Soweto in 1988, is the seed of everything I have since written about Gaza. I recount it not as autobiography but as method.

Like millions of South Africans, I welcomed the collapse of apartheid with a hope that bordered on astonishment. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an extraordinary act of political imagination. It asked victims to testify publicly, perpetrators to confess openly, and an entire nation to face truths it had spent generations denying.

I admired its courage. I still do.

Yet admiration slowly gave way to unease, and the question announced itself almost imperceptibly. Could reconciliation become so compelling a moral ideal that it inadvertently postponed justice?

Years later I tried to answer that in an essay describing the TRC as a kind of public performance—not because it lacked sincerity, but because symbolic healing was arriving before material repair. Confession was more visible than restitution. Gestures of reconciliation came to stand in for the return of stolen land, for bodies broken, for breadwinners killed.

Not long before his death, Desmond Tutu, who had chaired the Commission, said plainly that the victims had waited too long for their reparations, and warned that if justice were foreclosed the moral victory of reconciliation would itself be in jeopardy.

I was already circling a problem I had not yet fully understood. The language available to me then was insufficient.

Only later did I encounter Robert Meister’s After Evil, one of those rare books in which another scholar gives conceptual form to an intuition that has accompanied you for years without finding its own vocabulary. Modern humanitarian politics, he argues, converts justice into something deferred. Violence must cease. Victims deserve recognition. Memory must be preserved. But structural transformation can wait.

Justice becomes tomorrow’s task. Compassion becomes today’s achievement.

He traces this deferral to a political-theological genealogy: a structure in which evil is acknowledged while judgment is displaced to a distant horizon. Secularized, it reappears in liberal humanitarianism, where peace is preserved by suspending accountability, protecting perpetrators, and stabilizing inherited relations of power. Justice is not abolished. It is converted into a moral economy of patience and forgiveness.

I closed the book with an uncomfortable thought. Perhaps these were not only South African questions. Perhaps they belonged to the modern world as such.

When Israel began its systematic destruction of Gaza after October 2023, they returned with startling clarity.

Once again governments expressed profound humanitarian concern. Once again agencies counted the dead with heartbreaking precision. Once again institutions debated legal thresholds while civilians disappeared beneath concrete.

The humanitarian vocabulary had never been richer. Justice had never seemed more absent.

The contrast disturbed me because I had seen a version of it before—not in its scale, certainly not in its brutality, but in its moral structure. Suffering was receiving extraordinary attention while the conditions producing it remained untouched.

This became one of the central arguments of my essay in Political Theology: the humanitarian order is extraordinarily skilled at administering compassion. It is far less capable of interrupting power.

(Jaber Jehad Badwan, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

III. The Word That Would Not Leave Me

There are books one reads for information, and books that quietly alter the questions one asks. They lie dormant until another historical moment awakens them.

Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz was such a book for me. I first went to Levi to understand the Holocaust. I expected testimony. I did not expect a question that would accompany me for years.

It was contained in a single word.

Muselmann.

Levi uses the term for those prisoners who had reached the outermost limit of human endurance—men and women consumed by hunger and exhaustion, barely responsive to pain, regarded with contempt even by fellow inmates, existing somewhere between life and death. Viktor Frankl, newly arrived at Auschwitz in 1944, was told that anyone who came to look like a “Moslem” would sooner or later go to the gas chambers.

What arrested me was not only the condition being described. It was the name.

Why were these dying Jews called Muslims?

For years I let the question rest, assuming it belonged to the internal history of the camps—slang, an accident of language, one of those cruel coinages that emerge under unimaginable suffering.

But words are rarely innocent. Names carry histories. They gather assumptions long before they enter ordinary speech. Civilizations reveal themselves not only in what they celebrate but in the metaphors they inherit without ever examining.

The crucial fact, which took me a long time to absorb, is that the term was not Nazi nomenclature. It was assigned by Jews to other Jews. That displacement is precisely what demands explanation. A name can function as a term of ultimate degradation only when the surrounding culture has already, over centuries, loaded it with the associations that make such degradation legible.

So the question is not who coined the word in the camp, but what made it available and intelligible there.

The answer lies in Europe’s theological archive.

Long before the camps, Islam appeared in European thought not as a tradition understood on its own terms but as a foil against which Christendom defined itself: the imitation, the false religion, the faith of mere submission. Kant relegated it to obedient, heteronomous religion incapable of genuine moral autonomy—constructing, in effect, an epistemic Muselmann. Hegel cast Islam as a religion of immediacy and fervor without ethical depth. Franz Rosenzweig, drawing on a flawed etymology of islām as resignation rather than surrender to God, made Islam the very type of lifeless obedience: duty without dialectic, submission without transformation.

None of these thinkers caused what happened in the Nazi extermination camps. There is no direct line of transmission, and I claim none. My claim is more modest and more troubling. A conceptual field had been prepared in which “the Muslim” was already legible as a figure of diminished interiority—a human being emptied of inner life and imagined as beyond redemption.

The camp did not invent that imagination. It inherited it.

This changed the way I thought about Gaza. I no longer saw dehumanization as the rhetoric that merely accompanies war, but as something older and far more dangerous. To call someone a Muselmann was not to describe a condition. It was to prepare a person for annihilation—to relocate them outside the domain of meaningful life, so that their death would not register as a loss.

The bombs come later. Language arrives first.

Watching Gaza, I returned to this insight again and again. Hospitals became “dual-use facilities.” Universities became “military infrastructure.” Whole neighborhoods vanished beneath the vocabulary of security. Starvation became strategy while wearing the costume of military necessity. If mere proximity to a combatant makes a building a legitimate target, then no hospital and no university anywhere is safe.

I do not suggest that history repeats itself. Every catastrophe has its own genealogy, and Gaza is not Auschwitz; historical integrity requires us to resist facile analogies. What is at stake is not analogy but continuity: the persistence of an imaginary in which Muslim life, but also the lives of Christians and secularists appear as life already forfeited.

The willingness to render an entire population morally expendable does not appear overnight. It is cultivated, narrated, rationalized, until extraordinary violence begins to look regrettably ordinary. The greatest irony is that Israel, an entity allegedly formed after the Holocaust on Palestinian land, is now exterminating Palestinians on a daily basis. The genocide never stopped.

And that, unexpectedly, brought me back to Ghazālī.

Modern readers associate imagination with fantasy or invention. Ghazālī understood something deeper: the imagination mediates between perception and judgment. It shapes what we are capable of seeing. It enlarges or diminishes the moral world long before any legal judgment is rendered.

Which is why political theology finally became unavoidable for me. Not because theology explains politics, but because it discloses the moral architecture within which politics becomes imaginable. Every civilization carries buried assumptions about justice, sacrifice, innocence, and power, and eventually those assumptions stop looking theological. They become common sense.

That is precisely what makes them so powerful.

IV. Karbalā, or the Refusal

If the Muselmann is the figure in which the European degradation of Islam reaches its most catastrophic conclusion—where submission becomes lifelessness, obedience becomes biological extinction, and naming becomes annihilation—then Karbalā is its structural inversion.

Ḥusayn does not become a Muselmann. Ḥusayn, the son of ʿAli and beloved grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad.

Facing impossible odds in Iraq in the year 680, the Prophet’s grandson refused to let the submission signified by his name be converted into the extinction of his moral agency. That is the whole argument in a single gesture. The divine invitation to surrender—islām—is not an invitation to resignation. It is the active, willed offering of the self to a justice whose aim exceeds mere survival.

If the Muselmann is the European archive’s fantasy of Muslim submission, vacancy, and fatalism, then Karbalā names what that fantasy represses: the refusal to submit to any sovereignty that is not divine, and with it a radical assertion of human dignity. And that justice will be redeemed.

The tradition being caricatured already contained, at its heart, the refutation of the caricature.

V. Returning to the Prophetic Imagination

The vocabularies of contemporary political discourse—international law, security studies, diplomacy, human rights—remain indispensable. But each describes only a portion of what unfolded before us. They can catalogue destruction, debate proportionality, measure humanitarian need. What they cannot answer is the prior question.

How did such destruction become morally imaginable?

The answer, I came to believe, requires another vocabulary: political theology. Not as a European tradition running through Carl Schmitt, and not as an attempt to baptize politics in religious language, but political theology in the prophetic sense—a way of asking how God, justice, power, memory, and human dignity become entangled within history.

The prophets did not enter history because societies lacked information. They entered because societies had grown accustomed to injustice. Their task was interruption. They refused to let power become self-justifying.

This is also the genius of the Islamic tradition. Its deepest political insights rarely begin with sovereignty. They begin with accountability.

The Qur’an returns to justice not as an abstract virtue but as the condition of faithful existence: God commands you to repay pledges to the people due to them, and to judge with justice when you judge between people (Q. 4:58). Ghazālī insists that injustice—ẓulm—begins not in the court but in the soul, and that a ruler who can intervene and does not has not remained neutral but has become complicit. Delegation does not dilute responsibility; it intensifies it. What Nuremberg would later formalize as command responsibility, Ghazālī had already articulated as a moral necessity. Ibn Taymīya holds that God will sustain a just community even if it is unbelieving, and will not sustain an unjust one even if it professes faith. And Ismāʿīl al-Fārūqī, born in Jaffa, argued for dismantling an exclusionary Zionist state while insisting, as a matter of Islamic principle, that this could never mean the destruction of Jewish lives or property—envisioning restitution and return for Palestinians, and a federation in which Jews live as free citizens.

These thinkers differed on much. They converged on one thing.

Justice is not the ornament of political life. It is its measure.

And justice here is never blind to human frailty. It is paired with iḥsān, the awareness that all conduct is shadowed by the divine presence, and it reaches toward something more demanding than retribution: Repel evil with that which is more beautiful—and then the one with whom you had enmity will become a devoted friend (Q. 41:34). But that transformation cannot be counterfeited. Reconciliation is not theater. It requires restitution of what was stolen, compensation for what was destroyed, and the empowerment of the oppressed to seek redress. Only once redress is secured does the appeal to pardon become morally coherent.

I think here of Muhammad Asad—Leopold Weiss—who as a young Jewish journalist in 1922 asked Chaim Weizmann the question that ruptured the conversation: And what about the Arabs? Weizmann shrugged: they would not be in the majority for long. Decades later, having lost family in the Nazi camps, Asad was told he was entitled to compensation from the Austrian government. He recoiled. He would not accept blood money to salve other people’s consciences. Only God, he told his son, the anthropologist Professor Talal Asad, could forgive such a crime.

That is what a moral order sounds like before it has been hollowed out.

The questions that first surfaced on that road in Soweto I once imagined belonged to South Africa. History has taught me otherwise. They were always larger.

What compels justice? Can reconciliation exist without accountability? How does a civilization learn to see some lives as grievable and others as administratively necessary? What language remains when the ordinary vocabulary of politics can no longer bear the moral weight of events?

They eventually led me to write a scholarly article on Gaza and Muslim political theology. But the article was only one stop toward a new destination of the imagination and political struggle. The journey began much earlier—in a Bombay bookshop, in Cape Town newsrooms, in conversations with Christian, Jewish and secular friends trying to think their way out of a catastrophe, and in the slow recognition that ideas sometimes require a lifetime before they disclose what they have been asking of us all along.

Gaza did not teach me a new theology.

It taught me to read the old one differently.

And perhaps that is what every genuine encounter with history finally does. It does not simply change our opinions.

It changes our sight.

This essay draws on my article

“Gaza and Muslim Political Theology: Three Meditations on Justice, Extermination, and the Humanitarian Order,” published open access in Political Theology (2026).

My latest essay for Hashiya is now live. It’s a deeply personal reflection on my formation in the Islamic tradition, the “existential interrogation” sparked by the post-9/11 era, and the need for a mode of engagement that refuses both nostalgia and capitulation.

If you’ve ever felt caught between the world you inherited and the world you inhabit, this piece is for you.

Read “Inhabiting the Threshold (Dihlīz)” at the link below
https://hashiya.org/posts/inhabiting-threshold-dihlz

Download the Book (Open Access

We often hear that science and religion are on a collision course, but what if the real story is much more sophisticated—and much more hopeful?

After years of research into the intellectual pulse of Islam and its historical dance with scientific inquiry, I am thrilled to finally share my latest work: Muslim Theological Encounters with Science.

Because I believe these conversations should not be locked behind a paywall, I have partnered with Cambridge University Press to make this book fully Open Access. This isn’t just a publication; it’s an invitation to rethink everything you know about the ‘conflict’ between faith and the laboratory.

Don’t let the paywalls of academia win. Grab your copy below and join the conversation.

Download your copy of the book here

There is a verse in the Qurʾān that has stayed with me for years. In Sūra Fuṣṣilāt (41:34–35), God commands:

“The good deed and the evil deed are not equal. Repel evil with that which is more beautiful — and then the one between whom and you there was enmity will become as though he were a devoted friend. But none is granted this quality except those who are patient, and none is granted it except one who possesses great fortune.”

Notice what is being promised here. Not merely a better response to hostility — but a transformation of the hostile person themselves. The one who was your enemy becomes, through your beautiful response, as though he were a devoted friend. This is not conflict management. It is a revolutionary ontological claim: that beauty, sustained under pressure, has the power to alter another human being’s inner orientation toward you. The Qurʾān is not asking for politeness. It is describing a moral force capable of remaking the world.

And then the verse immediately qualifies itself. This quality — this capacity for transformative beauty — is granted only to those who are patient, and only to those who possess “great fortune.” A rare gift. A form of moral grace that cannot be manufactured on demand, only cultivated over a lifetime.

I have been thinking about what it means to build an entire theology on that principle.

The question I was recently asked to address — Does Islam have a liberation theology? — is one I want to answer with some precision. Islam does not merely have a liberation theology or a religious discourse that prizes emancipation. At its most luminous — in its scripture, its jurisprudence, its mystical and ethical imagination — Islam is a liberatory discourse. Or it is nothing worthy of the name.

But the comparison with Latin American liberation theology is instructive precisely in where it breaks down. When Gustavo Gutiérrez — the Peruvian theologian credited with coining the phrase “preferential option for the poor” — was writing in the late 1960s, he was making an argument about recovery. Christian theology had been captured by the Church’s alliance with state power and needed to be returned to the original radicalism of the Gospel — to a Christ who stood among the dispossessed. Liberation theology, in its Latin American form, was a theological rebellion against a theology that had made its peace with oppression.

Islam’s situation is different. The preferential option for the oppressed was never absent from its founding texts. It was there from the beginning — inscribed not as a corrective footnote but as a constitutional principle of the Qurʾān itself.

Consider Sūra al-Nisāʾ, verse seventy-five. The early Muslim community in Mecca is being persecuted. Some Muslims — those with safety and capacity — are hesitating to act on behalf of those being ground down. And then God speaks, in a tone of unmistakable astonishment: “And why should you not fight in the cause of God, and for the oppressed among men, women, and children — who cry out: Our Lord, deliver us from this town whose people are unjust?”

God is not merely permitting the defense of the oppressed. He is expressing bewilderment at the believers’ inaction — as if this hesitation is itself an anomaly, a violation of something self-evident. Interpreters such as Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 944) reads it as establishing a binding duty. Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) stresses that God “denies any excuse for abandoning” this responsibility. The distinction from Gutiérrez matters enormously: when Muslims abandon the oppressed today, they are not simply failing politically. They are betraying their scripture.

There is a story about the Prophet’s companion Abū Bakr (d. 634 ) that illuminates what it means to respond beautifully rather than reactively.

A man was insulting Abū Bakr in the Prophet’s presence. The Prophet sat there — and, remarkably, was smiling. Abū Bakr maintained his composure. Then the insults grew more extreme, and Abū Bakr finally replied in kind. At that moment, the Prophet stood up and walked away. Abū Bakr followed, bewildered: “He was insulting me while you sat smiling — but when I answered him back, you became angry?”

The Prophet replied: “There was an angel with you, responding on your behalf. But when you answered him back, Satan appeared — and I am not one to sit with Satan.”

The theological claim here can be stated philosophically: when you respond to ugliness with beauty, you alter the moral field of the encounter. You refuse to let the aggressor set the terms. You operate from a higher logic than the logic of exchange. But the moment you descend into the logic of like-for-like — however understandable, however justified — you have entered a different moral architecture. One in which, as the Prophet’s departure signals, a certain divine presence quietly withdraws.

This is not a counsel of passivity. The Qurʾān also recognizes what I would call a post-contractual ethics — the ethics of injury received and repair required. Islamic jurisprudence does not sentimentalize harm. It demands restitution. The question is not whether to seek justice, but how — whether the form in which the struggle is prosecuted preserves the moral character of those who undertake it.

The pre-partition Indian poet Shakīl Badāyūnī (d. 1970) put the danger memorably:

“My aspiration is so high, I do not fear the burning coals left by adversaries. I do indeed tremble at the fire of the rose, dreading its blaze will torch the entire garden.”

He is speaking of an internal fire more dangerous than any external threat — the fire of pride dressed as principle, of retribution masquerading as justice. A liberation theology without this internal vigilance becomes merely the mirror image of the power it opposes: equally certain of its righteousness, equally deaf to its own excesses.

The tradition I am drawing on understands the ground of human dignity not as a social contract, not as a post-Enlightenment discovery, but as something older and stranger: the amāna, the divine trust. The Qurʾān tells us that God offered this trust to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains — and they all declined to bear it. The human being alone accepted. We are, in the language of the tradition, carriers of the divine trust. Every human face is a site where divine qualities are reflected, however dimly.

This is not sentiment. It is Muslim political theology at its most demanding. If every human being carries this trust, then to oppress any person is to disfigure the face of creation itself. “We have indeed ennobled the children of Adam” (Q. 17:70) — every child of Adam, without exception.

What does this mean practically? It means the question is never only about changing who holds power. The sixteenth-century Persian miniaturist Dūst Muḥammad (d. 1564) — student of the legendary Behzād, a man whose entire vocation was the creation of visual beauty in the Safavid court — wrote something that has stayed with me: “When a human is ignorant in their being, they cannot be called human simply because of their form.” He prayed to be made to share intrinsically in humanity — not merely to carry its outward shape.

Liberation that changes only the external form — that puts new people in power without transforming the moral character of how power is exercised — is not liberation at all. It is a change of clothing without a change of soul. The form shifts; the inner void persists.

We live in the shadow of a catastrophe. The ongoing destruction in Gaza in Palestine where over a 100, 000 souls were killed, the destruction of first Iraq, Afghanistan, then Libya, then Syria by senseless US and European military actions with zero outcomes, save for barbarous destruction of human life and the environment. At this moment it is the attack on Iran and Lebanon by the joint efforts of the Zionist Israeli entity—bankrolled by US taxpayers—and the the Trump administration, both are not a distant theoretical problem for Muslim theology when thousands are being killed, maimed, their security eroded, their homes and livelihood being destroyed. Iran has adopted an asymmetric war posture facing an existential threat by attacking US military entities in the Gulf countries from which the war is waged on Iran. These are diagnostic events — the moment that reveals whether our theology is real or performative, whether our justice is structural or merely sentimental.

The political theorist Robert Meister has argued that the post-World War II humanitarian order — which presents itself as the guardian of human dignity — works by converting moral outrage into depoliticized compassion. It allows us to feel righteous about preventing future evils without addressing present injustices or the structural conditions that produce them. “Never Again” becomes a formula that stabilizes the existing global order rather than overturning it. The language of human rights becomes a tool that protects the victors of history while the victims wait — indefinitely.

Muslim political theology has a response to this. Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) insisted that a sovereign who remains silent in the face of injustice bears the full weight of that injustice. Ibn Taymīya (d. 1328) insisted that a covenant systematically violated dissolves the very legitimacy it was meant to sustain. These are not decorative classical citations. They are load-bearing arguments: reconciliation without repair is theater; peace without restitution is the imposition of the victor’s narrative on the defeated.

Beauty, truth, and justice — iḥsān, ḥaqq, ʿadl — are not three separate ideas in the Islamic tradition. They are one idea, refracted through three prisms. A liberation theology that is not beautiful will exhaust itself in accusation. One that is not truthful will produce only slogans. One that is not just will only redistribute oppression.

And running through all three is the insight of Fuṣṣilāt 41:34 — that the goal is not merely to defeat the enemy, but to transform them. To act with such sustained moral beauty that enmity itself becomes friendship. That is either the most naïve idea in the history of ethics, or the most radical. I believe it is the latter.

Idfaʿ billati hiya aḥsan. Repel evil with that which is more beautiful.

It is the hardest command in the tradition. And perhaps, in this particular moment, the most necessary.

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ

Bismillāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm.

الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ، وَالصَّلَاةُ وَالسَّلَامُ عَلَى رَسُولِ اللَّهِ، وَعَلَى آلِهِ وَصَحْبِهِ أَجْمَعِينَ.

All praise belongs to God. Peace and blessings be upon His Messenger, upon his family, and upon all his companions.

Dear brothers and sisters, we are three days into Ramadan. Three days into the month that changed the world. God says in the Qur’an:

شَهْرُ رَمَضَانَ الَّذِي أُنزِلَ فِيهِ الْقُرْآنُ هُدًى لِّلنَّاسِ وَبَيِّنَاتٍ مِّنَ الْهُدَىٰ وَالْفُرْقَانِ

“The month of Ramadan is the month in which the Qur’an was sent down — a guidance for humanity, clear proofs of guidance, and the criterion between right and wrong.” (2:185)

Ramadan is not simply the month of fasting. It is the month of the Qur’an. The fast clears space — in our bodies, in our habits, in our hours — for the Book to enter more deeply. And the Qur’an, we should remember, was not revealed to passive recipients. It was revealed, again and again, to a people it calls أُولُو الْأَلْبَابِ — those who possess understanding, those who think, those who reflect.

Listen to how God describes them:

إِنَّ فِي خَلْقِ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَاخْتِلَافِ اللَّيْلِ وَالنَّهَارِ لَآيَاتٍ لِّأُولِي الْأَلْبَابِ ﴿١٩٠﴾ الَّذِينَ يَذْكُرُونَ اللَّهَ قِيَامًا وَقُعُودًا وَعَلَىٰ جُنُوبِهِمْ

“In the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day, there are signs for those who possess understanding — those who remember God standing, sitting, and lying on their sides.” (3:190–191)

Notice: the people of reflection are immediately, inseparably, described as people of remembrance. To think deeply about creation is to remember Allah constantly. And to remember Allah constantly is — at its most structured, its most disciplined, its most complete — to pray.

This is what our sermon is about today. Three prophetic reports that reveal the shape of the soul that God loves. And then, what it means to bring that soul fully into prayer.

PART ONE: THREE PORTRAITS OF A BELIEVER

The First Hadith — Salvation Through Love

A Bedouin came to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, and asked:

يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ، مَتَى السَّاعَةُ؟

“O Messenger of God — when is the Hour?”

The Prophet did not answer. He rose and performed the prayer. Then, when it was complete, he asked:

أَيْنَ السَّائِلُ عَنِ السَّاعَةِ؟

“Where is the one who asked about the Hour?”

The man came forward. “I am the one, O Messenger of God.”

The Prophet said: مَا أَعْدَدْتَ لَهَا؟ — “What have you prepared for it?”

The man answered with remarkable honesty: “O Messenger of God, I have not prepared an abundance of prayer or fasting — but I love God and I love His Messenger.”

And then came one of the most beautiful utterances in all of prophetic speech:

الْمَرْءُ مَعَ مَنْ أَحَبَّ، وَأَنْتَ مَعَ مَنْ أَحْبَبْتَ

“A person is with those whom one loves — and you are with those you love.”

Brothers and sisters, notice what the Prophet did before he answered. He prayed. He did not give the man a lecture on the day of judgment. He showed him. He stood, bowed, prostrated, and returned. The answer was already being enacted. And then he spoke.

What is the moral of this report? It is this: the question about salvation — when is the Hour, how do I make it — is answered not by counting our acts, but by examining our orientation. The Bedouin had no impressive ledger of prayers and fasts. But he had love. Love for God. Love for the Prophet. And the Prophet declared: that love places you with them.

This does not mean acts do not matter. It means that acts without love are empty, and love without acts is incomplete. What this man’s love would naturally produce — if it were real — is exactly what the Prophet modelled before answering: prayer. Love and prayer are inseparable. If you love someone, you keep their company. Prayer is how we keep the company of God.

The Second Hadith — The Weight of What We Transmit

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said:

مَنْ سَنَّ فِي الْإِسْلَامِ سُنَّةً حَسَنَةً فَلَهُ أَجْرُهَا وَأَجْرُ مَنْ عَمِلَ بِهَا بَعْدَهُ، مِنْ غَيْرِ أَنْ يَنْقُصَ مِنْ أُجُورِهِمْ شَيْءٌ. وَمَنْ سَنَّ فِي الْإِسْلَامِ سُنَّةً سَيِّئَةً كَانَ عَلَيْهِ وِزْرُهَا وَوِزْرُ مَنْ عَمِلَ بِهَا مِنْ بَعْدِهِ، مِنْ غَيْرِ أَنْ يَنْقُصَ مِنْ أَوْزَارِهِمْ شَيْءٌ

“Whoever inaugurates a good practice shall obtain its reward — and the reward of those who act upon it after the one who started it, without diminishing their reward. And whoever inaugurates an evil practice shall bear its burden — and the burden of those who act upon it after the one who started it, without diminishing their burden.”

The moral here is profound and sobering: we are not only accountable for what we do. We are accountable for what we model, what we transmit, what we pass on to those who come after us.

In Ramadan, our children are watching us. The young people in our families are watching us. What practice are we inaugurating for them? Do they see us wake for Fajr? Do they see us slow down at Maghrib, leave distraction behind, and stand before God? Do they see us carry our prayer mats to work? Do they see us treat prayer as a necessity, not an afterthought?

If we give them a practice of faith that is alive, disciplined, and rooted in love — then long after we are gone, their prayers carry our reward. But if we transmit indifference, if we model a faith that is reduced to occasional, reluctant gestures — that too leaves its mark.

This is a weighty teaching. And in Ramadan, when habits are being reset and routines are being rebuilt, it is exactly the right moment to ask: what am I starting? What am I passing on?

The Third Hadith — The Strength That Matters Most

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said:

لَيْسَ الشَّدِيدُ بِالصُّرَعَةِ، إِنَّمَا الشَّدِيدُ الَّذِي يَمْلِكُ نَفْسَهُ عِنْدَ الْغَضَبِ

“The strong person is not one who overcomes others by force. The truly strong person is the one who demonstrates self-control when anger rises.”

We admire strength. We celebrate it. But the Prophet here performs a radical redefinition. The one who pins another man to the ground in a wrestling match — that is not where strength ultimately lies. The one who, at the moment their blood is rising, their ego is clamoring, their pride is demanding satisfaction — holds themselves — that person is truly strong.

And what trains this capacity? What is the discipline, repeated five times a day, that asks you to stop what you are doing, leave behind your concern, your frustration, your worldly preoccupation — and stand in submission before Allah?

Prayer is the daily school of self-mastery. And Ramadan intensifies the curriculum. Hunger and thirst are not merely physical disciplines. They are training in the mastery of the self. They teach us: I am not subject to my impulses. I can choose. And that same capacity — to choose composure over reaction, presence over distraction, Allah over ego — is what we carry into every prayer.

Three hadiths. Three moral foundations. Love that orients us toward God. Responsibility for what we transmit. Self-mastery as the mark of true strength. These are the qualities of the person who is ready — truly ready — to pray.

PART TWO: PRAYER AS THE DEFINITION OF DĪN

Brothers and sisters, we use the word dīn loosely, often translated simply as “religion.” But dīn in the Qur’anic and prophetic tradition carries something far richer. It names a prophetically tutored path — a divinely disclosed way of living, remembering, and moving doing the GOOD. It is not a private conviction locked inside. It is a form of life, enacted, embodied, and transmitted in the form of the GOOD.

And at the very center of that form of life is: ritual prayer, ṣalāt.

The tradition records that ritual prayer is عِمَادُ الدِّينِ — the pillar of dīn. But before we unpack that image, consider what it means for prayer to be central to the very definition of this path. It is not an obligation tucked among many. It is what gives shape and structure to everything else. A Muslim is, in the most essential sense, someone who prays.

Consider what prayer is called. It is described as the عصام الْيَقِينِ — the cord of certitude. The image comes from the leather strap that secured a waterskin in the desert — the means by which precious water was carried without spilling. What does this mean for us? Certitude — our deep, living knowledge of God — is not automatically retained. Life wears at it. Distraction dilutes it. Grief, busyness, disappointment — these things cause it to seep away. Prayer is what secures it. Five times a day, we retie the cord. We prevent our certainty from dissipating into the noise.

Prayer is also called the غُرَّةُ الطَّاعَاتِ — the bright blaze on the forehead of obedience. The image is of the luminous mark on the forehead of a noble horse — the sign by which it is distinguished, recognized, known as excellent. Prayer is what makes the believer’s obedience visible, elevated, and distinguished. It is the mark of who we are.

So, when we ask: what is a Muslim? The answer the tradition gives is not primarily a statement of belief, though belief is essential. It is: a Muslim is one who prays. One whose day is structured around the remembrance of God. One whose body bows and prostrates. One who returns, five times, regardless of what else is happening, to stand before the One who made them.

PART THREE: PRAYER AS PILLAR — AND WHAT IT DEMANDS

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said: الصَّلَاةُ عِمَادُ الدِّينِ — “Prayer is the pillar of dīn.”

Unpack this image. Think of a tent in the desert — the kind familiar to the early community, the very community the Prophet spoke to. The tent has walls, ropes, covering, stakes in the ground. But none of that stands without one thing: the central pole. Remove the pole and the tent collapses. Everything else — the walls, the ropes, the fabric — falls to the ground in a heap. It was the pole that gave all of it meaning, shape, and shelter.

This is ṣalāt-prayer. Without it, the rest of our dīn — our charity, our fasting, our hajj, our ethics — has no structure to inhabit. They remain as worthy individual gestures, but they do not cohere into a life. Prayer is the pole that holds the tent upright. And the tent, remember, is shelter. The tent protects the body from heat and cold, from danger and exposure. Dīn is shelter for the soul in the same way. And it stands only because prayer stands at its center.

Brothers and sisters, this raises an urgent question. If prayer is the pillar — what kind of prayer? Because we all know it is possible to go through the motions of prayer while the heart is entirely elsewhere. To bow the body while the mind is at work, at home, in an argument, in anxiety. The tradition addresses this directly. And what it says is demanding — and liberating.

What Prayer Actually Requires

The tradition teaches that prayer has a body and a spirit. The body of prayer — the movements, the postures, the words — are visible and learnable. But prayer has a spirit, and without it, prayer is present in form, but absent, in reality.

The first requirement of that spirit is خُشُوع — khushū’ — most closely translated as humble composure, or reverent submissiveness. It is not simply feeling sad or solemn. It is a state in which the entire self — body and soul together — is oriented toward God. The body lowers itself; the heart lowers itself. The knees bend outward; the ego bends inward. This is khushū’.

Several Qur’anic verses underscore it. God says: أَقِمِ الصَّلَاةَ لِذِكْرِي — “Establish the prayer for My remembrance.” (20:14) The purpose of prayer, named by Allah Himself, is dhikr — remembrance. And you cannot truly remember what your mind has abandoned.

God also says: وَلَا تَكُن مِّنَ الْغَافِلِينَ — “Do not be among the heedless ones.” (7:205) Heedlessness — ghafla — is the great enemy of prayer. And the tradition goes further: a heart preoccupied with worldly concerns, anxiety, and obsessive worry is in a state of spiritual intoxication. This is why God warns: لَا تَقْرَبُوا الصَّلَاةَ وَأَنتُمْ سُكَارَىٰ — “Do not approach prayers while intoxicated.” (4:43) The scholars note: the intoxication most dangerous to prayer is not wine. It is the intoxication of distraction — when the mind is so drunk on the world that it cannot be present before God.

How many of us pray without imbibing wine, yet remain completely absent from what we are reciting?

The second requirement of prayer’s spirit is حُضُورُ الْقَلْبِ — ḥuḍūr al-qalb — the attentive presence of the heart. This is not merely directing attention toward prayer. It is being present within it. It is the difference between looking at something and seeing it. Between reciting words and meaning them.

The Prophet described what prayer should be:

الصَّلَاةُ تَمَسْكُنٌ، وَتَوَاضُعٌ، وَتَضَرُّعٌ، وَتَأَوُّهٌ، وَتَنَادُمٌ

“Prayer is humble composure, humble submission, supplication, yearning, and contrition.” And then: “It is to raise your hands imploring: ‘O Allah! O Allah!’ Whoever fails to attain this state possesses a defective prayer.”

Five words. Each one describes a state of the interior self that must accompany the exterior action. Humble composure — the body and soul settled before God. Humble submission — the ego surrendered. Supplication — the heart actively calling. Yearning — a genuine longing for God’s response. Contrition — the awareness that we come before God not with claims but with need.

These states cannot be faked. They cannot be put on for two minutes and discarded. They must be cultivated. And this is exactly the purpose of Ramadan. Ramadan strips away the insulation that normally prevents these states from forming. Hunger reminds us we are creatures, not self-sufficient. Thirst reminds us we depend on God for everything. The breaking of routine opens space for the heart to be moved again.

The tradition also teaches that prayer has six dimensions of interior experience that the worshipper should seek to cultivate: attentive presence of the heart; understanding of what is being recited; magnification of the One being addressed; awe before His majesty; hope in His mercy; and modesty — the awareness that we stand before One who knows us entirely. These are not optional enhancements. They are what prayer is for. They are how prayer transforms the person who prays.

PART FOUR: THE NIGHT, THE MERCY, AND THIS RAMADAN

Brothers and sisters, there is one final image I want to leave you with, and it concerns the night.

The Prophet informed us of what God does in the final third of every night. God — and we say this without attributing to Him any physical movement, for He is far beyond that; what descends is His mercy, not His essence — God turns toward the lowest heaven and calls out:

هَلْ مِنْ مُسْتَغْفِرٍ؟ هَلْ مِنْ تَائِبٍ؟ هَلْ مِنْ سَائِلٍ؟

“Is there one who seeks forgiveness, that I may forgive? Is there one who repents, that I may accept? Is there one who asks, that I may give?”

Until dawn breaks. Every night. Not just in Ramadan — but how much more urgent, how much more accessible, does this feel in Ramadan, when we are already awake in those hours, already softened, already aware that time is passing and that time is a gift?

What descends in those hours is not God’s essence — that is beyond all location and motion. What descends is the transition from His attribute of majesty to His attribute of generosity. From retribution to beneficence. The night becomes a classroom. Time becomes a teacher. And prayer — the voluntary night vigil, the tahajjud, the whispered du’ā in the dark — is how we answer His call.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, loved those night hours. The Qur’an was revealed into them. And three days into Ramadan, we have an invitation — urgent, open, deeply merciful — to reorganize our nights around that call.

CLOSING

Let us return to where we began. The Bedouin who came to the Prophet without an impressive ledger. Who had no accumulation of extra prayers and fasts to declare. But who loved God and loved His Messenger. And who was told: you are with those you love.

That answer is as true today as it was then. But love is not a feeling alone. Love is a form of life. Love shows up. Love keeps company. Love is structured, disciplined, and embodied — in every prayer, five times a day, the body bowing to the One the heart loves.

إِذا نِلتُ مِنكَ الوُدَّ فَالكُلُّ هَيِّنٌ

وَكُلُّ الَّذي فَوقَ التُرابِ تُرابِ

When your love were mine, all would be light

All above dust remains dust

Ramadan is the month the Qur’an descended. It is addressed to people who think. And those who think, the Qur’an tells us, are those who remember God standing, sitting, and lying on their sides. In other words: constantly. Completely. With their whole selves.

May God make us among them. May He make our prayers this Ramadan not merely present in form but alive in spirit. May He grant us khushū’ — that humble composure that settles the body and the soul together. May He grant us ḥuḍūr al-qalb — that attentive presence that excludes the world and opens us, fully, to Him. And may He accept from us, and from our families, and from all the Muslims, in this blessed month.

آمِينَ. آمِينَ. آمِينَ.

أَقُولُ قَوْلِي هَذَا وَأَسْتَغْفِرُ اللَّهَ لِي وَلَكُمْ وَلِسَائِرِ الْمُسْلِمِينَ، فَاسْتَغْفِرُوهُ إِنَّهُ هُوَ الْغَفُورُ الرَّحِيمُ.

اللَّهُمَّ إنَّا نَسْألُكَ مُوجِباتِ رَحْمَتِكَ

O Lord, we beseech Thee for those works which draw forth Thy mercy,

وَعَزائِمَ مَغْفِرَتِكَ

for the steadfast will to seek after good deeds that lead to Thy forgiveness,

والسَّلامَةَ مِنْ كُلِّ إثمٍ

for deliverance from every sin,

والغَنِيمَةَ مِنْ كُلِّ بِرٍّ

for success in all that is righteous,

والفَوْزَ بالجَنَّةِ

for the triumph of entering Thy heavenly Kingdom,

والنَّجاةَ مِنَ النَّارِ

and for the salvation that rescues us from the fires of perdition.

اللهم إنا نسألك حبك، وحب من يحبك، وحب عمل يقربنا إلى حبك

“O Lord, We ask Thee for the gift of loving Thee, and of loving those who love Thee, and of loving the deeds that draw US ever closer to Thy love”

أنَّ رسولَ اللهِ - صلَّى اللهُ علَيهِ وسلَّمَ - كانَ يقولُ في آخرِ وترِهِ : اللَّهمَّ ! إنِّي أعوذُ برضاكَ من سخطِكَ ، وبمعافاتِكَ من عقوبتِكَ ، وأعوذُ بِكَ منكَ ، لا أُحصي ثَناءً عليكَ ، أنتَ كما أثنيتَ علَى نفسِكَ

The Prophet of God, may peace and blessings be upon him, would say at the end of his night prayer: “O Lord, I seek the shelter of Thy pleasure to guard me from Thy displeasure, and the refuge of Thy mercy to shield me from Thy punishment. I seek refuge in Thee—from even Thee. I cannot hope to capture Thy praise in full; Thou art as Thou hast praised Thyself.”

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