The Drive Out
A few weeks ago, I was invited to give a talk at Virginia Tech, four and a half hours away, and I did not want to make the drive alone. Nine hours on the road is a long time to spend with nothing but my own thoughts. Still, asking for help has never come easily to me—it has always felt easier to do things myself. But this time I reached out to one of the shabab (young men) I had been spending time with and asked if he wanted to ride along. He couldn’t make it, but he suggested someone else.
It was perfect. We were close, Al-Humdulillah, but we'd spent nearly all our time together in a group—our circle, gatherings, the conversations that linger after a program ends, etc. We had never really had one-on-one time. And hours in a car, with no agenda and nowhere else to be, has a way of making room for the things we don’t usually say when other people are around.
I knew a drive that long would have its lulls, and I wanted our time on the road to carry some barakah (blessing) and benefit. So before we left, I grabbed the fifth volume of Al-Ghunya li-Talibi Tariq Al-Haqq (Sufficient Provision for Seekers of the Path of Truth) by Sultan Al-Awliya (Sultan of the Saints), Sh. Abdul-Qadir Al-Jilani (d. 561/1166). I wanted him to read while I listened. A few hours in, he opened it and began. It wasn’t a lesson. Every so often something on the page would send us off on a tangent, and eventually we would find our way back to the book. And then he read this:
“The servant does not experience love until he becomes a seeker, and he does not become a seeker until his commitment to the search is absolute. His commitment to the search does not become absolute, until the firebrand of reverent awe [jamrat al-khashya] has been cast into his heart, and has burned everything it contains.”1
We read it again. Then again. I honestly don’t remember what either of us said afterward—only that it was mind-boggling, and that we kept circling back to it, two or three times, each pass attempting to peel back another layer.
I think part of it is that everyone wants to experience love. Just think how much of our movies and music are about it. But this was a completely different way of framing it than how we usually think about love. We tend to imagine love as the beginning of something—the spark that draws us toward another person. We think of it almost entirely in terms of people, and only rarely, at best, in terms of Allah. And a lot of what we call love is really longing. Sh. Abdul-Qadir is describing love in its highest form: love of Allah, and what that love requires of us. In his telling, you only get there by seeking Allah with total commitment, and that commitment doesn’t come until awe has burned through everything else in the heart. I kept thinking about that for the rest of the drive.
At Arm’s Length
For most of my years as an Imam, I was available to the community in the way the role asks: there for the emergency, then gone once it passed. A couple on the verge of divorce, or a young person calling on the brink of despair. In those moments, I served, and I was fully present. But my pastoral care was triage. I would stabilize, advise, refer when necessary, and step back.
I built closeness with some people, Al-Humdulillah, but it was always at arm’s length. I never wanted to become too involved in anyone’s life, and I rarely leaned in where leaning in might come with expectations. Some people did receive ongoing care from me, but only through their own effort—they had to keep seeking me out, because I was not going to come looking for them. Looking back, the reaching always fell to them. Once they came, I gave what I could, but I never made the first move.
Part of it, I told myself, was principle. I didn’t want people to become dependent on me. If I were always there to carry them, they might never learn to stand on their own two feet, and that concern is real. It still is. But if I’m honest, it was also a convenient excuse to keep my distance. The people who taught me to stand on my own were close to me, and they stayed close.
In retrospect, I think that distance was also fear. I have written before about keeping my heart guarded against hope, and I did the same thing with people. If I never let anyone get too close, no one could let me down. And, though I didn’t see it this way at the time, no one could be let down by me either. The distance protected us both, or at least it felt that way. It also meant that the people who needed more than an emergency response, and who would never think to ask for it, rarely received it.
I don’t think this posture is unique to me. Our roles often reward it. Imams, especially at large institutions, are measured by how we handle the crises that come to us and the programs we run, rarely by the lives we help form over years. Amid the administration, the programming, and the steady stream of emergencies, forming people can quietly become secondary, and sometimes it is forgotten altogether. The scale and weight of a large masjid only compound this. An Imam may carry some responsibility for thousands of people, and no one can go deep with thousands. That is real, and I have said as much before. But I also used it as cover. Some of my distance came from the size of the congregation, and some of it was my choice.
And many of us carry the same instinct into our friendships: available if someone reaches out, seldom the one who reaches. My grandmother would say, “The phone works both ways.” Most of us are waiting for it to ring.
In my own work, the professional frame only deepened that distance. The trouble starts when a vocation slowly turns into a job. Max Weber once distinguished between those who live for their calling and those who live from it, and modern institutions, for all their good, tend to nudge us from the first toward the second.2 As an Imam on staff, I had a role on one side of the table, people came with needs on the other, and we both understood the terms. There is nothing wrong with that. Many people came with real sincerity, and I hope I met them with mine. But a relationship organized around a job has a ceiling. Real care can happen inside that arrangement, but it rarely turns into brotherhood, because both people know what the relationship is for and where it ends.
Sh. Abdul-Qadir describes the fellowship of brothers in almost the opposite terms. He even calls it “a binding contract of service,” but where each party focuses on themselves. The seeker claims no right over any of his brothers, and regards each of them as having a right over him.3 This is what the tradition means by khidmah (service). It’s worship, done for the sake of Allah, with no exchange expected, since the reward is with Him.
Around the time I resigned from ADAMS, I kept mentioning “my shabab” in conversations with a mentor of mine. Eventually he asked me who they were, and to name them. Naming them was easy; they were the young men I already felt closest to. When I did, he offered advice that sounded almost administrative: put them into an iMessage group and stay more organized with my focus, so my efforts could actually have an impact. It wasn’t a spiritual teaching, at least not on the surface. So I opened my phone and made the group. I didn’t think much of it at the time.
Jabr Al-Khawatir
In Arabic, jabr first refers to setting a broken bone. The jabira is the splint—the thing bound against the injury and left there until the bone knits back together. Khatir, the singular of this blog’s name, describes what passes through the heart, but in everyday speech it also means a person’s feelings, the tender place in them. Kasr al-khatir is to break someone’s heart, to let them down. So jabr al-khawatir (mending hearts) is something like setting another person's inner bone.We all carry tender places like that, and it doesn’t take much to crack them. Sometimes being overlooked is enough.
What I keep returning to is the splint. Setting a bone happens in a moment: firm, deliberate pressure, sometimes painful, done for the patient’s sake rather than the healer’s. But the jabira has to stay. It is bound against the injury and left there for weeks, long after the dramatic part is over, holding everything in place while the bone does its slow, unseen work. If it comes off too early, the bone can heal crooked.
Looking back at my years of triage, I set a great many bones. I was there for the break—the phone call, the crisis, the counseling session—but I rarely stayed bound. The people who mended me never cared for me that way. They stuck around. When I was eighteen and lost in Makkah, a brother who came to share my dorm room took me under his wing. He walked to our favorite Yemeni restaurant to bring me soup when I was sick, and told me, “Bro, figure it out,” when I needed that instead. He didn’t set one bone and move on. He was gentle with me when I needed it and hard on me when I needed that, and he kept at it for a long time. That was jabr.
The difficulty is that staying means remaining within reach of both possibilities. Whoever is close enough to set a heart is close enough to break it, and the second possibility carries more weight than we tend to admit. Imam Abdallah ibn Alawi Al-Haddad (d. 1132/1720) counseled those who sought his guidance to “comfort the brokenhearted,” and warned them against unjustly harming a Muslim, citing a narration in which the Prophet ﷺ says, “Anyone who hurts a Muslim has hurt me, and the man who hurts me has hurt God.”4 Whatever one makes of that narration’s chain, the gravity of his warning is unmistakable. A believer’s heart is not ours to handle carelessly. Breaking someone’s heart is a serious matter before Allah. Staying close to someone makes us responsible for how we handle their heart.”
The Ones Who Stayed
Over the following months, the group thinned. Nobody fell out with anybody, and there were no hard feelings. People simply found their place. Those who stayed were the ones genuinely interested in tarbiya (spiritual cultivation), with the capacity to receive it from me. Those who drifted were not failing at anything. Formation depends on fit, and not everyone receives from everyone. I pray others are cultivating them better than I ever could.
What struck me was how different this process was from the one I had lived with for years. In the old arrangement, people were sorted by persistence: whoever kept seeking me out received care. Here, I had reached first, and what sorted people was their own seeking—of Allah, not of me. On the same page as the passage we read in the car, Sh. Abdul-Qadir cites the verse in which Allah commands His Messenger ﷺ, “Keep yourself patient with those who call upon their Lord morning and evening, seeking His countenance, and let not your eyes pass beyond them.”5 Allah tells him to stay with the seekers.
That doesn’t mean everyone else is owed nothing. Sh. Abdul-Qadir distinguishes between the fellowship of brothers and fellowship with strangers. Toward strangers, the seeker is to look with kindness and compassion and be patient with their habits, while keeping away from close association as far as he can.6 Everyone is owed kindness, while brotherhood, with everything it asks of us, is for a smaller circle. None of this is permission to remain close to someone who harms us. It describes people who share a path, bound by a commitment to Allah.
Brothers
Before the book ever came out, and in all the tangents around it, the conversation wandered the way long drives allow. We talked about our families and where we come from. He told me parts of his story I had never heard, and I told him parts of mine. His story is his to tell, so I won’t share it here. But by the time we arrived, I knew him differently than when we set out. Before, I mostly knew him from our circle. Now I knew some of his history, because he’d trusted me with it.
It occurred to me later that none of this would have happened in the old arrangement. Triage doesn’t leave room for that kind of exchange. Someone comes with a need, I listen, I offer what I can, and the conversation ends. It mostly runs one way. In the car, I talked as much as he did. I wasn’t only listening to his story; I was telling mine. And I had asked him there in the first place because I didn’t want to make the drive alone. There is a vulnerability in asking for company that I had avoided for years. It admits that the one who is supposed to be steady also needs someone beside him.
That, I think, is the part of brotherhood the professional frame cannot hold. Brotherhood means letting the other person know you too. Stepping away from full-time Imam work gave me something large institutions rarely leave their Imams: time for the slow work of knowing a few people well. Time alone would not have done it. The group made it possible, and the trip is where it actually happened. Since then, loving these brothers harder has meant something simple and unglamorous: being invested in their lives, following up on what they’ve shared, inviting them along when I travel.
The Firebrand
I have been sitting with Sh. Abdul-Qadir’s words since the trip, and I think they explain something about my years at arm’s length that I couldn’t see while I was living them. The fear that kept me from staying bound was a fear for myself: I was afraid of being let down, and of the expectations that come with being part of someone’s life. It was quiet and reasonable, even professional. At the time, I would have called it being sensible.
He describes a different fear. Khashya is reverent awe of Allah, and in his telling it doesn’t sit politely beside our other fears. It is a firebrand cast into the heart that burns everything it contains, including, I have come to think, the smaller fears we build our lives around. A heart in awe of Allah has less room to be preoccupied with being let down by people, because it is no longer looking to people for what only He can give. A page later, he quotes a saying: a fit of love’s ardor dwarfs any fit of terror.7 As that love grows, the smaller fear shrinks beside it.
I am not describing a place I have reached. The firebrand has not burned everything in me, and I’m not sure I can even say the guardedness has loosened. What the new posture has done is show me where the work is: the moments I still hesitate to reach first, the expectations I still flinch from. I could only see that in the company of brothers seeking the same thing. That may be the quiet logic of the passage itself. Love comes to people who are seeking, and seeking was never meant to be done alone.
I think this is where many of us get stuck, in our communities and in our friendships. We want the love without the seeking. We want closeness, but we don’t want what it costs. So we help in the moment and then leave, because leaving feels safer.Sh. Abdul-Qadir’s account of love asks something harder of us: to let our awe of Allah grow larger than our fear for ourselves, and to trust that love will follow.
And it did, in its own way. I had brought the book so that he could read and I could listen. I thought I was the one offering something on that trip. By the end of it, I wasn’t sure who had been mending whom.
Staying Bound
Most people reading this are not Imams, and most of us will never sit across a counseling table from anyone. But I suspect the pattern is familiar anyway. Think of the friend whose marriage ended. We called that first week, then let it drift. The convert everyone celebrated at her shahada (declaration of faith) may have been alone by the next Ramadan. There’s the coworker we genuinely liked but only ever saw at work, and the sibling we hear from only when something goes wrong. In each case, we set the bone, and we were sincere when we did. Then life got busy, and we moved on.
It rarely looks dramatic. Most of the time it is small and unremarkable: Usually it’s something small, like checking in a few weeks later to ask how things are going. Sometimes it is as simple as not wanting to make a long drive alone, and asking someone to come.
None of us can stay bound to everyone, and we aren’t asked to. It’s worth asking whether there’s anyone we’ve stayed with long enough for something to heal. For many of us, if we are honest, the answer is no one, or no one since a season of life that has long since passed.
And if we are among those whose bones were set and then left, there may be a mercy hidden in that, too. Those of us who were left that way may understand better than most why staying matters.
The Drive Back
I wish I could say something remarkable happened on the way home—a breakthrough, a moment that tied everything together. Nothing like that happened, and I don’t think anything needed to. The relationship was never meant to produce something. The relationship simply grew stronger.
Healing is mostly invisible while it’s happening. A bone knits beneath the splint slowly and out of sight, and no one watching would know anything was happening at all. The roots just grew deeper.
May Allah reward my mentor, whose simple advice began all of this, and every mentor who has stayed beside us, holding us steady until something in us could mend. May He make us among those who keep themselves patiently with those who seek His face. May He give us the courage to reach first, the humility to be known, and the steadfastness to stay. May He bless us with true suhba (spiritual companionship), and make us that kind of companion for others. And may He mend our hearts as we try, however imperfectly, to mend the hearts of others, with goodness, ease, and well-being in this life and the next.
Ultimately, with Allah is all success.
Abdul-Qadir Al-Jilani, Sufficient Provision for Seekers of the Path of Truth (Al-Ghunya li-Talibi Tariq Al-Haqq), trans. Muhtar Holland, vol. 5 (Hollywood, FL: Al-Baz Publishing, 1997), 7.
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 40.
Al-Jilani, Sufficient Provision, vol. 5, 43.
Imam Abdallah ibn Alawi Al-Haddad, The Book of Assistance, trans. Mostafa Al-Badawi, chs. 23–24. Al-Tabarani records the narration in Al-Mujam Al-Awsat (3607) and Al-Bayhaqi in Shuab Al-Iman (2741); its chain is considered weak.
Quran 18:28.
Al-Jilani, Sufficient Provision, vol. 5, 45.
Ibid., 8.
This hit me so hard it gave me a 5-8-5 haiku
Closing the distance,
sets fire to the lazy boy.
Finally, empty.