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Longer studies: one topic followed through the sources until it settles.
258 essays
Pre Ramadan Shaʿbān Before Ramadan: A Practical Plan to Prepare Your Heart and Habits Shaʿbān is the one month the Prophet fasted almost in full, and the reason he gave was that he wanted his deeds raised up to Allah while he was fasting. Ten concrete habits — from qaḍāʾ fasts to an early zakāh payment — turn the same month into training for Ramadan rather than a countdown to it. Pre Ramadan The Promises of Ramadan: What This Month Actually Gives the One Who Seeks It Ramaḍān is usually described in generalities — a month of blessing, a chance to start over. The sources are more specific than that: named gates, a reward kept off the ordinary ledger, a single night weighed against a thousand months. Six of those specific promises, each traced to the page where it was recorded. Pre Ramadan A Ramadan Timetable That Holds: Building Days Around Prayer, Qur'an, and Restraint Most Ramadan resolutions quietly die by the second week because they were never written down anywhere. A practical way to build a daily timetable around the five prayers, a Qur'an target, dhikr, du'a and your closest relationships — and just as importantly, what to plan to cut out. Pre Ramadan The Gates Are Open: Why Ramadan's Arrival Deserves Celebration, Not Dread Ramadan is not a burden that lands on the calendar once a year — it is a season of mercy the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) told us to welcome with joy. Here is why the gates opening should feel like good news. Pre Ramadan Six Ways Social Media Steals Your Ramadan: How to Take It Back Before It Starts Research on social media names the mental-health toll; scholars named the spiritual one centuries earlier. Six specific harms it does to the heart, and a concrete Ramadan plan to take your attention back before the month begins. Pre Ramadan Exempted, Not Excluded: What Ramadan Still Asks of a Menstruating Woman A menstruating woman is exempted from prayer and fasting in Ramadan, not from Allah. This piece separates what every school agrees on from the one question that genuinely divides them — reciting the Qur'an from memory — and names what stays open to her without dispute. Pre Ramadan Ramadan and Illness: The Fiqh of the Fast You Cannot Keep and the Worship You Still Can Illness does not cancel Ramadan's mercy — it activates a different part of it. What the Qur'an and two Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī narrations actually say about the fast you may be excused from, the reward that keeps recording itself anyway, and the prayer the Prophet himself made over the sick. Fasting· Part 1 of 4 Lawful at Night, Forbidden by Day: How Fasting Retrains the Appetites The Qur'an permits the same act at night that it withdraws by day, using one word for both rulings. A hadith aims that identical word at the tongue rather than the body, and another explains why: the fast was never really a rule about the stomach. Food is simply the appetite the day can check. Fasting· Part 2 of 4 Fasting Was Never About Hunger: The Purpose the Qur'an Names Fasting is the one act of worship whose purpose is named inside the verse that legislates it: "so that you may attain taqwā." A hadith in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī about false speech shows exactly what it looks like when the outward fast is kept in full and that purpose is missed anyway. Fasting· Part 3 of 4 A Month of Practising Restraint: Fasting as Training in Ṣabr A fast has one moving part: refusing something entirely lawful, on a schedule, until refusal itself becomes practised. What the Prophet's instruction for handling an insult while fasting reveals about why that particular drill was chosen, and what proves whether the training actually transferred. Fasting· Part 4 of 4 Two Meals That Teach Gratitude: The Blessing in Suḥūr and Ifṭār A sip of water at sunset and a few dates before dawn are unremarkable on any other day of the year. In Ramaḍān, the Sunnah names each of them — blessing on one, a counted joy on the other — and in naming them, teaches what gratitude for something ordinary actually looks like. Iman in Ramadan Know Him First: Why Maʿrifah Comes Before Every Act of Worship Worship aimed at a stranger cannot go very deep. The Qur'an issues the command to know Allah before it issues the command to worship Him — this is a walk through why that order matters and four concrete ways to close the gap between the two. Articles Deeds Are Judged by Their Endings: How to Leave Ramadan Well The last nights of Ramadan are not a wind-down. Five habits the early Muslims practiced as the month closed — fearing rejection, asking for acceptance, closing with istighfar, watching for pride, and paying sadaqat al-fitr before the takbir starts. Articles Ayat al-Kursi: The Qur'an's Greatest Verse of Protection A single verse of Surat al-Baqarah is named by the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) as the greatest in the Qur'an, and taught as a guard against harm until morning. Here is what the classical sources actually say — and one popular claim about it that took real digging to settle. Articles Twenty Qualities the Qur'an Names, and the Verse Behind Each One The Qur'an does not describe good character as a mood to aim for — it names it, twenty times over, each instruction tied to one exact verse you can open and read for yourself. Every one of those twenty verses, gathered and checked against the text. Articles The Knots on Your Own Head: Why Tahajjud Begins Before You Sleep A hadith locates the real obstacle to tahajjud not in a weak alarm clock but at the back of your own sleeping head, where three knots are tied every night. What actually undoes them, why an honest failed attempt still counts, and what the Qur'an says about the striving in between. Articles Two Supplications the Prophet Said Are Never Turned Away A companion's overheard prayer, a prophet crying out from inside a fish, and a phrase the Messenger told his companions to repeat until it stuck: three concrete ways the Qur'an and hadith teach us to call on Allah by His Beautiful Names and His Oneness. Articles The Ledger That Outlives You: Charity and Service in Ramadan A hadith graded ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ by its own compiler on the reward for feeding someone else's fast, a report on the Prophet's generosity "more than the wind that brings rain," and the debt of ṣadaqah that sits closest to home — the relative who still resents you. Checked against the primary sources, page by page. Articles Winter Is the Believer's Springtime: Checking a Saying Everyone Repeats Two lines about winter circulate every year as sayings of the Prophet: that winter is the believer's springtime, and that fasting it is the cold spoils. A look inside the actual books that carry them finds one graded weak, one graded two different ways by two different scholars, and a third, related saying about the night prayer that fails on both of its routes. Articles Welcome to the Quran Gallery blog A short note on why we built this blog and what you can expect — long-form articles, lecture transcripts, and reflections on the Qur'an. Iman in Ramadan The Uncrowded Door: How ʿUbudiyyah Speeds Your Journey to Allah ʿUbudiyyah — total, loving surrender to Allah — is the door every worshipper eventually finds uncrowded. Here is what the word means, why the Qur'an calls it the whole point of being created, and how it turns ordinary prayer, fasting and duʿā' into the fastest route to Him. Articles The Solitude He Never Skipped: What I'tikaf Asks of the Heart Before the first revelation ever reached him, the Messenger of Allah had already made a habit of disappearing to a cave outside Makkah. What that solitude became, after Prophethood, is a rite called iʿtikāf — and the record shows he kept it every single year, then doubled it the year he died. Articles Al-Fātiḥah: The Only Sūrah Divided Between Allah and You A hadith qudsī splits Sūrat al-Fātiḥah's seven verses exactly in half — Allah's own words, then the servant's request — with the pivot landing on a single line every worshiper repeats in every rakʿah. Articles Three Days Is Too Fast, a Month Is Too Slow The hadith on reciting the whole Qur'an gives two boundaries, not a target — and the seven-day division scheme often quoted as sunnah rests on a report that hadith editors grade weak. What the primary sources actually say, page by page.
