The Example Is Not the Problem
The gap between us and the Awliyāʾ is not what we have been telling ourselves it is.
A mentor of mine was coming to town for an event, and we planned to get lunch after Jumuʿah. As I was driving to meet him, I got a voice note where he mentioned, almost in passing, that his program would end late and he needed a place to crash. There was a mentee with him who would be accompanying him.
I was honored. In fifteen years, we have only been together in person a handful of times, and the times he has slept under my roof, I can count on one hand. This time, he was arranging it himself, over a voice note, the way an older brother asks something of a younger one and assumes the answer without waiting for it.
I pulled into the parking lot and quickly called my wife before going in. I told her we were having unexpected company and asked her to wash the linens. Once I got into Taco Zocalo, she sent me a text asking only one thing: “What time would they be arriving?” MashaAllah, I know my wife. In the simplicity of her question were layers of angst and anticipation of hosting, trying to discern how much I was inconveniencing her day’s plans. “Not until after 10pm.”
Everyone ordered and sat down. Conversations overlapped, broke off to the side, and expanded back to make room for everyone. At some point, someone said something, and the mentee asked a question: “Should the scholars give us a more reasonable example, because not all of us are capable of what they do?”
No Profane Time
The mentee’s question was sincere and innocuous; it was the natural question of a man formed by this culture. It is the question almost any of us would have asked. We have inherited a culture that has trained us to question whether or not every demand placed on us is reasonable.
The Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society, names the shift that produced this question. The disciplinary societies of an earlier age, he writes, were governed by Should. Their negativity was the negativity of prohibition and commandment. Late-modern society, in contrast, is an achievement society, and its governing word is Can. “Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation.”1 The new subject of this society is not the obedient citizen but the self-starting entrepreneur—a manager of himself, whose horizon is possibility rather than obligation.
How this alters our inner life is subtle. Once Can becomes the governing verb of one’s life, every demand begins to feel like an imposition on a private project. The scholars are not unreasonable because they actually demand the impossible; they are unreasonable because they demand at all, in a culture that has trained us to treat demand itself as an affront to our autonomy. The baseline is comfort and preference, and that is the imagination the deen does not grant.
Other Abrahamic traditions have a sabbath. We have Jumuʿah. But, albeit our holy day, Jumuʿah (literally Friday) is not a sabbath. After Allah commands us to “leave off business” and attend the Friday prayer, the following verse does not tell us to rest. It tells us to “disperse in the land and seek the bounty of Allah.”2 The command that closes the most sacred hour of our week is a command to go back out into the world. Not to a recovery day, not to a withdrawal, but to work (in the most general sense).
The theological reason for this is addressed directly in the Quran. Allah tells us, “We created the heavens and the earth and what is between them in six days, and no fatigue touched Us.”3 Allah does not rest, because Allah does not tire. The sabbath rests on a theology in which the Creator needed a day to recover from creating. Tawḥīd (the absolute oneness of Allah) does not. And the deen that flows from tawḥīd does not inherit a rest its God did not need. We were never given a day to recover from the rest of our life, because the rest of our life was never supposed to be the thing we needed to recover from.
There is no profane time. The world is not divided into sacred hours and ordinary hours, into worship and the rest of it. It is divided into intentionality and heedlessness. The sabbath frame assumes that work is spiritually neutral and that one must withdraw weekly to recover the sacred. The Islamic frame of ʿibādah (worship) collapses that distinction at the root. Work, rightly intended, is dhikr. Rest, rightly intended, is dhikr as is eating, sleeping, earning, and parenting. There is nothing to withdraw from, because there is nothing outside the field of worship to withdraw to.
When the mentee asked whether the scholars could give a more reasonable example, what he was really asking was whether there is a normal life we are allowed to keep, separate from the life of those who have given themselves entirely to Allah. The answer the deen gives us, in the verse that closes Jumuʿah and in the verse that describes the creation of the world, is no. There is no “normal” life. There is only this life, and what we do with it.
The Awliyāʾ Closed the Gap
When we invoke “scholars,” we tend to do so at a safe distance—the way one invokes saints. But these were men: they had bodies that hurt and nights that exhausted them. Imām Mālik ibn Anas (d. 179/795) would perform wudu, dress in his finest clothes, and perfume himself before transmitting a single hadith of the Prophet ﷺ. Sh. Abdul-Qadir Al-Jilani (d. 561/1166) taught for nearly forty years, from after Fajr until late into the night, raising students whose path is still walked today and whose lineage produced Salahuddin Ayyubi.
The natural first reaction is the one the mentee was articulating. These were exceptional people. Allah gave them something the rest of us did not get. The pace is admirable, but it is not for us. We are householders, employees, and citizens of a different age. We do what we can.
But this reaction is exactly what the deen does not let us have. It is true that Allah granted them things. The tradition is full of karāmāt (miraculous gifts granted to the Awliyāʾ)—barakah (blessing) placed in their time so that an hour did the work of a day,4 knowledge opened to them that had been closed to others,5 bodies sustained on what would have collapsed another man.6 We affirm all of it. But the second move we tend to make with it is where the deen parts ways with us.
The karāmāt were not their possessions. They were given by Allah, and given for a purpose—that the walī be drawn closer to Allah, and that those around him be drawn closer to Allah through him. Imām Al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) names this in his Epistle on Sufism: “one of the greatest miracles that the friends of God enjoy is assistance in acts of obedience.”7 The deepest karāma is being held in nearness; the spectacle, when it comes, is only its visible edge. The reverence Imam Mālik brought to a single hadith, the years Sh. Abdul-Qadir gave to teaching from Fajr to midnight—these were not their possessions either. They were what Allah placed in vessels who had given themselves to Him, on behalf of the Ummah that would inherit what passed through them.
This is what removes the excuse rather than handing it to us. If the karāmāt had been private rewards, we could rightly say Allah did not grant me that, so I am released from the demand. But they were not private rewards. They came to people who had already turned entirely toward Allah. The turning came first. The Prophet ﷺ told us, narrating from his Lord, “Whoever draws near to Me by a hand-span, I draw near to him by a forearm.”8
The gap between them and us is not what we have been telling ourselves it is. It is orientation. And orientation is not gated by what the body can sustain on its own, but rather by niyyah (intention). The Prophet ﷺ said, “Actions are by their intentions.”9 The one who emigrated for a woman did the same physical act as the one who emigrated for Allah, yet the two of them receive a completely different recompense. The act was identical; the niyyah was the whole thing. The karāmāt are Allah’s affair. The turning is ours.
They were not running on willpower alone. They were running on whatever Allah had placed in their time, and we believe Allah placed much in them. But they were also running on a niyyah that had been refined, year after year, until the work itself had become the worship and the worship had become the work. “And I did not create the jinn and humankind except that they may worship Me.”10 They had aligned their hours with the purpose of their creation, and Allah met that alignment with the grace that made the hours fruitful. The grace did not come to a man who was waiting for it. It came to a man who was already moving.
This is the part we do not want to hear, because it removes the excuse the other way. We want to say Allah gave them more. The truer statement is: Allah gives barakah to those who have given themselves. The Awliyāʾ (friends of Allah) are not a separate species. They are evidence. Their lives are the argument against the story we have been telling ourselves—that we have been waiting for a special grant of strength that was always going to come after the turning, never before it.
The mentee’s question—should the scholars give us a more reasonable example—presumes that the example is the problem. The example is not the problem. The example is the proof that what we are calling impossible has been done, by people who ate and slept and married and grieved and got tired exactly the way we do, and who were granted, after they had turned, the barakah to do more than their hours should have allowed. The grant is real. So is the turning that preceded it.
The Form of Your Station
After recognizing that the gap is orientation and not capacity, we have to recognize something else. ʿIbādah has a form, and the form is given by where Allah has placed us.
Imam Mālik’s ʿibādah looked like teaching the Muwaṭṭaʾ in Madīnah for forty years. Rābiʿah al-ʿAdawiyyah’s (d. 185/801) looked like solitary nights of weeping. The ʿibādah of Imām al-Shāfiʿī’s (d. 204/820) mother looked like raising him on almost nothing in Gaza and then Makkah, with a determination that produced one of the four schools of Sunni law. Each of them was given a station, and the worship was the full inhabiting of that station.
When the Prophet ﷺ heard Salman Al-Farisi (radiAllahu ʿanhu—Allah be pleased with him) say, “Your body has a right over you, your family has a right over you, so give each one its due,” he responded, “Salman has spoken the truth.”11 Inside his own home, his wife ʿĀʾishah (radiAllahu ʿanha—Allah be pleased with her) said, “He was a human being among human beings—he would mend his clothes, milk his sheep, and serve himself.”12 The greatest of creation, at home, was patching his own garment.
The form of his ʿibādah in that hour was patching the garment. That was not a lesser worship he was settling for. That was the worship. The Sufis have a phrase for this: ibn al-waqt—the son of the moment, the one whose worship is the hour Allah has placed him in.13 The diaper change at three in the morning, the clean linens for our guest—these are the forms of worship that have been given to us, in this station, in this body, in this moment.
It is one thing to fail at the worship we were given. It is another to look at the worship we were given and call it less than the worship we imagined. The two rakʿahs we are pining for were assigned to someone else at another station. The hours of solitary reading we fantasize about were given to a man who was not given the family we were given. The deep tahajjud we imagine was given to a woman who was not given the work we were given. To pine for the form that belongs to another station is, at bottom, ingratitude for the form that is ours.
The Awliyāʾ did not become Awliyāʾ by escaping their station. They became Awliyāʾ by fully inhabiting it, with their niyyah aligned consistently until the station itself was worn smooth by worship. The reason the scholar can study for sixteen hours is not that he is built differently; it is that he has stopped resenting the station that gave him the books.
The early Sufis had a name for this. Abū ʿAlī al-Juzjānī (d. 4th/10th c.), in a saying transmitted by Imām Al-Qushayrī, named it directly: “Be a seeker of uprightness, not a seeker of beneficence (karāma).”14 The lower self pursues the karāma; the Lord asks for the istiqāmah (steadfastness). The form of our station is exactly where this is asked of us.
Balance Is Not the Measure
Even after recognizing the form of our station, there is one more way we soften the demand. Balance is a word we put on top of all of this to flatten it. The way we use it now, it is a feeling-state. The metric is somatic. Am I depleted? Am I getting enough of what I need? Am I rested? Am I full? The frame is not bad in itself; the body matters, and the Prophet ﷺ told us it has a right. But somewhere along the way, balance stopped being one of the rights among many and became the right that orders all the others. We now decide whether we are doing well by asking how we feel.
This is not the metric the deen gives us. The metric is whether one is oriented toward Allah’s pleasure. The ḥuqūq (rights) one has been assigned are the floor below which one falls into injustice, not the goal. A man can feel balanced and be neglecting his Lord. A man can feel exhausted and be exactly where Allah wants him. The feeling does not adjudicate the state. On the contrary, the state adjudicates the feeling.
The Prophet ﷺ stood in prayer at night until his feet swelled, and when asked why—having been forgiven all past and future sins—he answered, “Should I not be a grateful servant?”15 The mother of Mūsā placed her infant on the Nile, and Allah said of her, “And the heart of Mūsā’s mother became empty.”16 Empty. Destroyed, in the feeling-state sense. And precisely where Allah wanted her. Abū Bakr gave away everything he owned and, when the Prophet ﷺ asked him what he had left for his family, answered, “I left for them Allah and His Messenger.”17 Uwais al-Qaranī cared for his ailing mother in obscure Yemen and never met the Prophet ﷺ—who named him anyway, instructing his Companions to ask Uwais for prayer if they ever met him.18 Imām Aḥmad (d. 241/855) was beaten for fifteen years and would not deny the Quran’s uncreatedness.
None of these is a picture of balance. They are pictures of obedience taken to its limit—not the standard of our own station, but proof of what total orientation can become when Allah enables it. And the deen calls them excellent, not because they were feeling well, but because they were well-oriented.
When the pleasure of Allah is on the other side of the scale, balance is not the answer. Obedience is. The ḥuqūq are weights placed in a field tilted toward Him, and the discernment of the deen is which weight goes where, in which season, for which person. Sometimes the body wins the hour. Sometimes the family wins the hour. Sometimes the masjid wins the hour. But the field itself is tilted, and the tilt is not negotiable. None of this is to say the body should be neglected or family abandoned—their rights are real, and to drop below them is itself injustice. But the goal is His pleasure, not balance.
The Awliyāʾ surrendered balance toward Allah. Not toward a person. Not toward an institution. Not toward an ambition dressed in religious language. The discernment between surrender toward Allah and surrender toward something that is using Allah’s name is itself part of the formation, and one does not develop it alone. But the discernment is downstream of the surrender. The first move is to stop treating balance as the measure, because as long as it is the measure, the answer to every demand will be that the demand is too much.
And this is what we accept in other domains of our lives. The founder who works hundred-hour weeks for a company that will be forgotten within a generation. The athlete who organizes every meal, every sleep cycle, every relationship around a body that will fail by forty. The artist who lives in poverty for twenty years to perfect a craft that maybe a thousand people will ever care about. We do not call these people unbalanced. We call them dedicated. We call them focused. We call them masters of their craft. We write books about them and assign them to our children.
And notice the second thing we admire about them, the part that is easy to miss. It is not just the total orientation. It is the total orientation plus the infrastructure. The athlete has a coach, a nutritionist, a trainer, a peer group of other athletes, and a literature stretching back centuries on how to train the body for what it will be asked to do. The founder has mentors, accelerators, advisors, investors, a culture of feedback, and a vocabulary of failure and iteration. The artist has teachers, schools, lineages, traditions. We understand intuitively that no one becomes elite alone. The worldly excellences all have transmitted traditions for organizing a life around their telos, and we accept that transmission is part of the work.
Then turn back to ourselves. We admire infrastructured total orientation when it serves a body that will fail. We admire it when it serves a company that will be forgotten. We pathologize it when it serves Allah. We have inherited the deepest infrastructure of formation in human history—the science of taṣawwuf (the science of purifying the heart and aligning it with Allah), the ṭuruq (the transmitted spiritual paths), the unbroken chains of suhba (companionship) that have been moving this orientation from heart to heart for fourteen centuries—and we have been refusing it. We have built a private spiritual life that asks nothing of us and produces nothing in us, and then we are puzzled as to why we are not the Awliyāʾ.
The Awliyāʾ are not asking us to become them in isolation. No one becomes a walī in isolation. They are aspirations. Mentors are guides. Peers are support. And in time, those of us who have walked far enough turn around and become guides for those behind us. The Quran gave us the structure in three lines, in the shortest sūra, the one the scholars say summarizes the religion. “And they enjoined upon one another the truth and enjoined upon one another patience.”19 The whole sūra is relational. The salvation it describes is the salvation of people moving together, calling each other back to the truth, calling each other to patience when the truth is heavy. It is not the salvation of the man alone with his app.
For the brother or sister who has no community yet, who is reading this and thinking I do not have a shaykh, I do not have a circle, I do not even know where to begin: the door is not closed. The Prophet ﷺ said, narrating from his Lord, “Whoever draws near to Me by a hand-span, I draw near to him by a forearm.” Begin by wanting it. The wanting is itself the first act of suhba—companionship with the longing for what we do not yet have. Allah meets the desire with arrangement. The teacher arrives when the student is sincere. But the wanting has to be real, and it has to be put into motion, because Allah does not arrange formation for those who are content to remain unformed.
My own teachers have suggested two practices to those who are still looking. The first is to make the duʿāʾ: “اللَّهُمَّ دُلَّنِي عَلَى مَنْ يَدُلُّنِي إِلَيْكَ — O Allah, guide me to one who will guide me to You.” The second is to increase one’s regular ṣalawāt upon the Prophet ﷺ. The duʿāʾ names the request. The ṣalawāt opens the heart to receive its answer, because every chain of guidance flows from him ﷺ. Both put the seeker in relationship long before the teacher arrives.
The reason we have not closed the gap is not that the gap is uncrossable. It is that we have been trying to cross it alone, in private, on willpower, with no one beside us and no one in front of us and no one behind us. That is not how the gap was ever closed.
The Bar Is Held
That night, my mentor and his mentee graced our home. It was a short visit, but beautiful nonetheless, MashaAllah. Our conversation went late into the night. We reminisced about the early days of our relationship, laughing at how dumb I was and how strict he was. But at some point, I noticed something I had not expected.
He was turning to me. Not in the casual way a guest defers to a host, but in the particular way I had once turned to him and my own teachers. He asked me what I thought and took it seriously when it came. The mentee was sitting with us, engaging with us, engaging me, and I understood what was happening.
The bar had not been lowered. The bar was being held. In my office there were three generations of suhba sitting on the floor—my mentor, who was still my mentor and was now also asking me; me, who was still a student and was now also being asked; and the younger man, who was still asking why the scholars could not be more reasonable, sitting in a room where the answer was being lived in front of him without anyone having to make it explicit.
The answer to his question was not given as an argument. It was given as a demonstration. The bar is not explained. It is inhabited, in the presence of those who are inhabiting it, until the one who is asking the question stops asking it because they have started to live inside the answer.
That is how the gap closes. Not by trying harder, alone. By stepping into the infrastructure of formation that has been transmitted for fourteen centuries—into the suhba of a guide ahead of us, peers beside us, and, when Allah enables it, a younger person behind us whose question we have already lived through. And by holding the orientation with us when we leave the masjid. “When the prayer is completed, disperse in the land.” We disperse, but we disperse oriented. And we do not disperse alone.
Ultimately, with Allah is all success.
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 9.
Quran 62:10.
Quran 50:38.
Quran 18:65.
Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), Al-Qushayrī’s Epistle on Sufism (Al-Risāla al-qushayriyya fī ʿilm al-taṣawwuf), trans. Alexander D. Knysh (Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 2007), 363.
Quran 51:56.
al-Qushayrī, Epistle on Sufism, 76.
al-Qushayrī, Epistle on Sufism, 218.
Quran 28:10.
Quran 103:3.