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The Best of Those Who Fast: Why Ramadan Is Built Around Dhikr
A man once asked the Prophet which fasters, which worshippers and which pilgrims earn the most reward, and got the same four-word answer every time. Ramadan's fast, prayer and charity are not separate disciplines — dhikr is the thread running through all three.
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- The Quran Gallery team
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A man once stopped the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) with a question about warriors: which of them earns the greatest reward? “Those who remember Allah most,” he answered. The man tried again with fasting. Same answer. Then prayer, then charity, then pilgrimage — four more questions, four identical answers. Abu Bakr turned to Umar and said, “The rememberers have taken all the good.” The Prophet agreed: “Yes, indeed.”
That exchange is not a throwaway anecdote about who wins a competition of good deeds. It is a claim about what actually makes an act of worship valuable in the first place — and it lands differently once you notice that Ramadan is the one month that stacks every discipline in that list on top of each other at once. You are fasting, praying qiyam, giving more in charity, reading more Qur’an, and if you can manage it, saving for a pilgrimage. The Prophet’s answer says the thing tying all of it together, the thing that decides how much any of it is worth, is how much of it is remembrance.
“Dhikr” gets translated as “remembrance,” which undersells it. The Qur’an ties it directly to a physical, felt outcome:
ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَتَطْمَئِنُّ قُلُوبُهُم بِذِكْرِ ٱللَّهِ ۗ أَلَا بِذِكْرِ ٱللَّهِ تَطْمَئِنُّ ٱلْقُلُوبُ Those who believe, and whose hearts find rest in the remembrance of Allah — truly it is in the remembrance of Allah that hearts find rest.
“Rest” here is ṭumaʾnīnah — the settling of something that was unsteady. Ramadan gives you plenty of reasons to feel unsteady: hunger, a shorter fuse by mid-afternoon, the low-grade anxiety of wondering whether this year’s fast is actually changing anything in you. The verse is not offering dhikr as one more item on the to-do list next to fasting and praying. It is naming the one thing in that list that is supposed to settle everything else down.
There is a reason for that settling that goes beyond a felt sensation. In a hadith qudsī — a saying in which the Prophet relays Allah’s own words — the closeness on offer is not metaphorical:
إِنَّ اللَّهَ ﷿ يَقُولُ: أَنَا مَعَ عَبْدِي إِذَا هُوَ ذَكَرَنِي، وَتَحَرَّكَتْ بِي شَفَتَاهُ Allah, mighty and glorious, says: I am with My servant when he remembers Me, and his lips move because of Me.
— Sunan Ibn Mājah, printed page 4/707 of , hadith 3792, graded ṣaḥīḥ by the editors.
Read that carefully and the promise is oddly specific: not “I reward My servant” but “I am with him,” triggered by the moment the lips actually move. Fasting empties the day of food and drink; dhikr is what a Ramadan day is supposed to fill that emptiness with instead.
Not all dhikr looks the same, and the distinction matters for how you plan a Ramadan day around it.
The first kind has no fixed wording, no fixed time, and no ceiling. It is reciting Qur’an between tasks, saying “subḥānAllāh” while you wait for suhoor to finish cooking, naming Allah’s attributes while you walk to the mosque for tarawih. It costs nothing to do more of it and there is no version of Ramadan where you have done too much.
The second kind is fixed — specific words, at specific moments, in a specific quantity: the remembrances said on waking and before sleep, after each prayer, before eating, on leaving the house. These are not interchangeable with the first kind; they are inherited wording the Prophet used at exactly these moments, and their value is partly in the discipline of returning to the same words at the same point in the day, every day, whether or not you feel like it that morning.
Ramadan is unusually well suited to building the second kind into a habit, because the month already restructures your clock around suhoor, prayer times and iftar. The dhikr companion in Adhkar times the morning and evening remembrances against your actual prayer schedule and tracks the count for the ones that are meant to be repeated a fixed number of times, so the habit survives past the first excited week of the month.
The same principle — steady over intense — shows up in how the Prophet described sustained worship generally, using the language of travel:
لَنْ يُنَجِّيَ أَحَدًا مِنْكُمْ عَمَلُهُ، قَالُوا: وَلَا أَنْتَ يَا رَسُولَ اللهِ، قَالَ: وَلَا أَنَا، إِلَّا أَنْ يَتَغَمَّدَنِي اللهُ بِرَحْمَةٍ، سَدِّدُوا، وَقَارِبُوا، وَاغْدُوا، وَرُوحُوا، وَشَيْءٌ مِنَ الدُّلْجَةِ، وَالْقَصْدَ الْقَصْدَ تَبْلُغُوا No one’s deeds alone will save him. They said, “Not even you, Messenger of Allah?” He said, “Not even me — unless Allah envelops me in mercy from Him. So aim straight, stay close to the mark, and travel — a stretch in the morning, a stretch in the evening, and something of the night — and with steadiness you will arrive.”
— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 8/98 of , hadith 6463.
That is a travel metaphor for exactly what the adhkār calendar already assumes: morning and evening are the two legs of the day’s journey, and a bit more before sleep gets you further than any single burst of effort. The Prophet named the morning and evening remembrances specifically as the anchor points worth protecting, alongside the last third of the night — which Ramadan already has you awake for, if you are praying qiyam or eating suhoor.
The Companion Muʿādh ibn Jabal reported a hadith that names what is actually at stake:
مَا عَمِلَ آدَمِيٌّ عَمَلًا أَنْجَى لَهُ مِنْ عَذَابِ اللَّهِ مِنْ ذِكْرِ اللَّهِ No deed a person does saves him more from Allah’s punishment than the remembrance of Allah.
— Majmaʿ al-Zawāʾid, printed page 10/73 of . Al-Haythamī attributes it to Aḥmad from Muʿādh ibn Jabal and notes that every narrator in the chain is otherwise found in the Ṣaḥīḥayn except one, Ziyād ibn Abī Ziyād, who did not actually meet Muʿādh — a gap worth knowing even where the rest of the chain is solid.
And on the very next page of the same collection, the hadith the Prophet gave about warriors, fasters, worshippers and the charitable — the one this piece opened with — is followed immediately by another report from Muʿādh, describing what he named as the last words he ever exchanged with the Prophet:
أَنْ تَمُوتَ وَلِسَانُكَ رَطْبٌ مِنْ ذِكْرِ اللَّهِ [The most beloved deed to Allah is] that you die while your tongue is still moist with the remembrance of Allah.
— recorded in Ibn Ḥibbān’s Ṣaḥīḥ, printed page 3/100 of .
Muʿādh asked the Prophet directly, at what both of them may have understood was their final meeting, which deed Allah loves most. The answer he carried away and passed on was not a specific ritual — it was a state to still be in whenever the end comes, unplanned and unscheduled. Ramadan does not guarantee anyone another Ramadan. Building the habit this month is, in that light, not really about this month.
None of the benefit above is automatic just because the right syllables were said. Dhikr done with the tongue alone and dhikr done with a present heart are not the same act wearing different levels of effort — they are different acts that happen to sound identical from outside. Saying “Allāhu akbar” while genuinely turning over, even briefly, how small you are next to what that phrase names is a different thing than letting the same four syllables pass by unremarked for the thousandth time that week.
The Qur’an widens the frame past human speech entirely:
تُسَبِّحُ لَهُ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتُ ٱلسَّبْعُ وَٱلْأَرْضُ وَمَن فِيهِنَّ ۚ وَإِن مِّن شَىْءٍ إِلَّا يُسَبِّحُ بِحَمْدِهِۦ وَلَـٰكِن لَّا تَفْقَهُونَ تَسْبِيحَهُمْ ۗ إِنَّهُۥ كَانَ حَلِيمًا غَفُورًا The seven heavens and the earth, and everyone in them, glorify Him. There is not a single thing that does not glorify Him with praise, but you do not understand their glorification. He is truly Most Forbearing, Ever-Forgiving.
If the entire created order is already engaged in dhikr in a register human beings cannot even perceive, then a person’s own dhikr is not adding something to a silent universe — it is joining something already in progress, consciously, in a way a mountain or a river cannot. That is the difference tafakkur — reflective awareness — makes: the same words, said while actually looking at what they describe, either in the sky above a Ramadan iftar table or in the specific mercy that let you wake up for suhoor at all.
None of this requires new vocabulary or a longer to-do list. It requires treating the remembrance you are probably already saying — the tasbīḥ after each prayer, the words before you break your fast, the Qur’an you are reading anyway this month — as the thing carrying the rest of what you are doing, rather than a formality attached to it. Say the fixed adhkār at their fixed times if you can manage nothing else; let the unfixed kind fill the gaps a fast leaves empty. The adhkar library has the morning and evening sets, the after-prayer remembrances, and a counter for the ones meant to be repeated, in case memory alone is not something you want to depend on this month.
If anything above is wrong — a rendering that misses the Arabic, a citation that does not hold up, a grading claim stated with more confidence than the source allows — tell us. That correction is worth more to us than the post standing unchallenged.
May Allah grant us tongues and hearts that do not tire of Him, in this Ramadan and in whichever one turns out to be our last.