Say It Loud: The Dhikr These Ten Days Actually Ask For

Almost everything else this season asks of a person requires leaving home. The standing at ʿArafah needs a tent on a particular plain. The sacrifice needs an animal and a place to offer it. The circling of the Kaʿbah needs the Kaʿbah. If you are not travelling this Dhū al-Ḥijjah, most of the season is, quite literally, happening somewhere else.

One deed is not like that. It needs no ticket, no animal, no plain. It needs a tongue that is already free to talk about anything else, redirected. The sources are specific about what it looked like in practice, and it did not look like a private habit kept behind closed doors.

The starting point is a report from ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar, who heard the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) name this stretch of the calendar directly:

مَا مِنْ أَيَّامٍ أَعْظَمُ عِنْدَ اللهِ وَلَا أَحَبُّ إِلَيْهِ الْعَمَلُ فِيهِنَّ مِنْ هَذِهِ الْأَيَّامِ الْعَشْرِ، فَأَكْثِرُوا فِيهِنَّ مِنَ التَّهْلِيلِ وَالتَّكْبِيرِ وَالتَّحْمِيدِ

There are no days greater in Allah’s sight, and in which good deeds are more beloved to Him, than these ten days — so multiply in them the tahlīl (لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ, “there is no god but Allah”), the takbīr (اَللَّهُ أَكْبَرُ, “Allah is greater”) and the taḥmīd (اَلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ, “praise belongs to Allah”).

— Musnad Aḥmad, printed page 10/296 of , hadith 6154, narrated from Ibn ʿUmar. The edition’s editors note that the report’s wording is ṣaḥīḥ, while flagging that this particular chain is weak because of one narrator, Yazīd ibn Abī Ziyād — and that the same report recurs elsewhere in the collection.

Notice what the command is not. It is not fast these ten days, or travel to them, or stand somewhere. It is say — three short phrases, repeated, in whatever room a person happens to be standing in. That puts this instruction within reach of literally everyone this season touches: the pilgrim between rites, and the person at home for whom none of the rites are happening at all.

What did “multiply” look like when the earliest generation practised it? Al-Bukhārī answers with a scene rather than a rule, opening a chapter on the merit of deeds in these days with a gloss from Ibn ʿAbbās on the Qurʾān’s own phrase for the season — ayyāmin maʿlūmāt, “known days,” which he reads as the ten days of Dhū al-Ḥijjah — and then a single sentence about two of the Prophet’s companions:

وَكَانَ ابْنُ عُمَرَ وَأَبُو هُرَيْرَةَ يَخْرُجَانِ إِلَى السُّوقِ فِي أَيَّامِ الْعَشْرِ يُكَبِّرَانِ وَيُكَبِّرُ النَّاسُ بِتَكْبِيرِهِمَا

Ibn ʿUmar and Abū Hurayrah used to go out to the marketplace during the ten days, reciting the takbīr, and the people would recite the takbīr along with them.

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 2/20 of , in the chapter on the merit of deeds in these days. Al-Bukhārī states it there without a connected chain — the form scholars of hadith call muʿallaq, “suspended” — though stated with the certainty of a definite report. Al-Albānī, tracing the report separately, grades it ṣaḥīḥ and notes that ʿAbd ibn Ḥumayd later transmitted it with a full chain through ʿAmr ibn Dīnār — Irwāʾ al-Ghalīl, printed page 3/124 of .

Read the scene for what it actually depicts. The marketplace is not a devotional space. Nobody there had gathered to worship; they had gathered to buy and sell. Two of the Prophet’s companions walked into that ordinary noise and put a different sound into it, loudly enough that strangers picked it up and carried it further. Dhikr, in this picture, is not something you protect from being overheard. It is something you are willing to start out loud, in a room that was not built for it, and let it spread past you.

A generation later, the historian and jurist Maymūn ibn Mahrān looked back on that same custom and was struck by how far it had already faded from what he remembered. Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī preserves his account, on the authority of al-Marwazī:

أَدْرَكْتُ النَّاسَ وَإِنَّهُمْ لَيُكَبِّرُونَ فِي الْعَشْرِ، حَتَّى كُنْتُ أُشَبِّهُهُ بِالْأَمْوَاجِ مِنْ كَثْرَتِهَا، وَيَقُولُ: إِنَّ النَّاسَ قَدْ نَقَصُوا فِي تَرْكِهِمُ التَّكْبِيرَ

I met people who used to recite the takbīr so much during the ten days that I would liken it, for how much there was of it, to the waves of the sea. And he used to say: people have grown deficient through their abandoning of the takbīr.

— Fatḥ al-Bārī, Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī’s commentary on Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 9/9 of .

Two things are worth sitting with here. First, the image itself: not a scattered word here and there, but a sound continuous enough that a listener reached for the sea to describe it. Second, the complaint folded inside it. Maymūn ibn Mahrān died in the second Islamic century — this is not a modern lament about a practice lost to modern distraction. Every generation since the first has apparently had to be reminded to say it out loud again. That is not a reason to feel behind. It is evidence that the correction has always been available, to whoever picks the habit back up. (The takbīr carries on through the three Days of Tashrīq that follow the ʿīd, though its wordings and timing there are their own subject.)

Put the hadith and the scene together and the shape of the instruction becomes clear. The ten days are, in Allah’s sight, the most valuable stretch of ordinary time a person gets all year — and the deed named for filling them is one that needs no pilgrimage to perform. While someone else stands at ʿArafah or leads an animal toward the place of sacrifice, the reader at home is not locked out of the season. The same three phrases are available on a commute, at a desk, over a sink of dishes, walking to a shop — exactly the ordinary hours Ibn ʿUmar and Abū Hurayrah chose for it themselves.

What the market scene adds is a correction to an assumption dhikr often carries: that it is a private matter, best kept quiet, closest to sincere when nobody else can hear it. That assumption is not what the earliest generation modelled during these ten days. They said it walking to buy and sell, loudly enough for it to catch. A verse revealed about remembering Allah in general, not tied to any rite or season, makes the same point about when this is meant to happen:

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ ٱذْكُرُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ ذِكْرًا كَثِيرًا وَسَبِّحُوهُ بُكْرَةً وَأَصِيلًا

O you who believe, remember Allah with much remembrance, and glorify Him morning and evening.

— Sūrat al-Aḥzāb, 33:41–42

Morning and evening are not devotional hours set apart from the rest of the day — they are simply the two ends of an ordinary one. That is the whole instruction for someone who will spend these ten days exactly where they already are: not a special place, not a special silence, just the same three phrases, said enough times, out loud enough, that whoever is nearby might say them with you.

Our adhkar app collects the daily remembrances — the ones for morning, evening and after each prayer — in one place to read or listen to whenever these ten days find you back in an ordinary room rather than a mosque.

If we have gotten a translation, a grading, or a page wrong here, tell us and we will correct it in the open — that is why every citation on this page opens the printed page it came from.

May Allah ﷻ accept the tahlīl, the takbīr and the taḥmīd of these ten days from everyone who says them — in a mosque, in a market, or alone in a kitchen where no one else can hear.