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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.
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- The Quran Gallery team
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- 9 min read
Buraydah reported that his father was present when the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) overheard a man praying:
اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَسْأَلُكَ بِأَنِّي أَشْهَدُ أَنَّكَ أَنْتَ اللهُ، لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا أَنْتَ، الْأَحَدُ الصَّمَدُ، الَّذِي لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ، وَلَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌ “O Allah, I ask You — for I bear witness that You are Allah, there is no god but You, the One, the Self-Sufficient Sustainer of all, who has not begotten and was not begotten, and to whom none is equal.”
The Prophet (peace be upon him) turned to those with him and said:
وَالَّذِي نَفْسِي بِيَدِهِ، لَقَدْ سَأَلَ اللهَ بِاسْمِهِ الْأَعْظَمِ الَّذِي إِذَا دُعِيَ بِهِ أَجَابَ وَإِذَا سُئِلَ بِهِ أَعْطَى “By the One in whose hand is my soul, that man has asked Allah by His greatest Name — the Name which, when He is called by it, He answers, and when He is asked by it, He gives.”
— Sunan al-Tirmidhī, printed page 5/462 of , a report al-Tirmidhī himself graded ḥasan gharīb.
Nothing in what the man said was unusual phrasing. He named Allah, denied any god beside Him, and quoted words everyone in that gathering had memorised as children. What made it, in the Prophet’s own description, an unrefusable prayer was not eloquence. It was that the man had reached for Allah’s Names and His Oneness as the means of asking, rather than asking in his own words alone.
Look again at the second half of what the man said: al-Aḥad al-Ṣamad, alladhī lam yalid wa lam yūlad, wa lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥad — “the One, the Self-Sufficient Master, who has not begotten and was not begotten, and to whom none is equal.” The last two clauses are not paraphrase. They are, almost word for word, the closing verses of Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ:
لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ “He has not begotten, nor was He begotten.”
وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌۢ “And there is none equal to Him.”
The two Names before them in his prayer, al-Aḥad (the One) and al-Ṣamad (the Self-Sufficient Master), are the same two Names that sūrah opens with. The man was not choosing adjectives he thought fitting. He was handing Allah’s own description of Himself back to Allah, then asking on the strength of it — which is the pattern this whole post is tracing: reach for what Allah has said about Himself, then ask.
That instinct is not folk practice. It is a command stated once, directly, in the Qur’an:
وَلِلَّهِ ٱلْأَسْمَآءُ ٱلْحُسْنَىٰ فَٱدْعُوهُ بِهَا ۖ وَذَرُوا۟ ٱلَّذِينَ يُلْحِدُونَ فِىٓ أَسْمَـٰٓئِهِۦ ۚ سَيُجْزَوْنَ مَا كَانُوا۟ يَعْمَلُونَ “To Allah belong the Most Beautiful Names, so call upon Him by them, and leave alone those who distort His names — they will be repaid for what they have done.”
The Arabic word for calling on Allah here, duʿāʾ (دُعَاء) — the same root the practice of “making duʿāʾ” comes from — covers two things at once: praising Allah with a Name and asking Allah for something using that Name. A person who says “O Al-Ghafūr, forgive me” is doing both in a single breath. This is what classical scholars of duʿāʾ call tawassul (تَوَسُّل) — approaching Allah through a means He Himself has named as valid, rather than inventing one. His Names and His Oneness are the means the Qur’an names first.
The same verse ends with a warning most readers pass over: leave alone those who yulḥidūn — distort or twist — Allah’s names. Two ways of doing that recur in how people actually speak about Allah: attaching a Name to Him that He never claimed, and stripping the meaning out of a Name He did claim, so that “the Merciful” or “the Just” becomes a title with nothing behind it. The command to call on Allah by His Names and the warning against distorting them are, in the same sentence, two sides of the same instruction: use the Names, and use them as Allah defined them.
The Qur’an gives one story where this method is shown rather than commanded. Yūnus (peace be upon him) had left his people in anger, believing — wrongly, as the verse makes clear — that Allah would not call him to account for it. He was swallowed by a great fish and found himself in what the Qur’an describes as triple darkness: the darkness of the sea, the darkness of night, and the darkness of the fish’s belly.
وَذَا ٱلنُّونِ إِذ ذَّهَبَ مُغَـٰضِبًا فَظَنَّ أَن لَّن نَّقْدِرَ عَلَيْهِ فَنَادَىٰ فِى ٱلظُّلُمَـٰتِ أَن لَّآ إِلَـٰهَ إِلَّآ أَنتَ سُبْحَـٰنَكَ إِنِّى كُنتُ مِنَ ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ “And [remember] the man of the fish, when he went off in anger and thought We would never call him to account. Then he cried out in the darknesses: ‘There is no god but You, glory be to You — truly I have been among the wrongdoers.‘”
Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ narrated that the Prophet (peace be upon him) singled out this exact sentence:
دَعْوَةُ ذِي النُّونِ إِذْ دَعَا وَهُوَ فِي بَطْنِ الْحُوتِ: لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا أَنْتَ سُبْحَانَكَ إِنِّي كُنْتُ مِنَ الظَّالِمِينَ؛ فَإِنَّهُ لَمْ يَدْعُ بِهَا رَجُلٌ مُسْلِمٌ فِي شَيْءٍ قَطُّ إِلَّا اسْتَجَابَ اللهُ لَهُ “The supplication of the man of the fish, when he called out from inside the whale — ‘There is no god but You, glory be to You, truly I have been among the wrongdoers’ — no Muslim man has ever supplicated with it in any matter at all except that Allah answered him.”
— Sunan al-Tirmidhī, printed page 5/484 of .
Read slowly, Yūnus’s prayer is not one idea repeated. It is three, stacked in order.
Lā ilāha illā anta — “there is no god but You” — states Allah’s Oneness (tawḥīd, تَوْحِيد): nothing else in existence has any share in being worshipped.
Subḥānaka — “glory be to You” — declares Allah free of every imperfection, including the imperfection Yūnus had just wrongly attributed to Him: that Allah would fail to hold him to account.
Innī kuntu min al-ẓālimīn — “truly I have been among the wrongdoers” — is Yūnus admitting his own fault before asking for anything.
Only after affirming who Allah is, clearing Him of any flaw, and naming his own error does the prayer end — with no explicit request at all. The request is left for Allah to answer on the strength of what came before it. That is the same order the man in the first story followed: witness who Allah is, deny any partner to Him, then ask.
Compare that to how a request is often phrased without this structure — straight to the need, with nothing before it. Neither the man’s prayer nor Yūnus’s was wrong to eventually ask; what both put first was establishing, in Allah’s own terms, who was being asked. The asking came after, not instead of, that.
Rabīʿah ibn ʿĀmir reported hearing the Prophet (peace be upon him) say:
أَلِظُّوا بِيَا ذَا الْجَلَالِ وَالْإِكْرَامِ “Persist in saying: O Owner of Majesty and Honour.”
— Musnad Aḥmad, printed page 29/138 of , an isnād the edition’s editors rate ṣaḥīḥ.
The verb alizzū means to hold fast to something and not let go of it, the way one clings to a rope. It is a direction to keep saying one phrase — a single Name paired with a single attribute — rather than searching for fresh words each time. Repetition of a true Name is not a lesser prayer than an eloquent one; on the evidence above, it is closer to what the Prophet described as guaranteed a response.
Abū Hurayrah narrated that the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said:
إِنَّ لِلهِ تِسْعَةً وَتِسْعِينَ اسْمًا، مِائَةً إِلَّا وَاحِدًا، مَنْ أَحْصَاهَا دَخَلَ الْجَنَّةَ “Allah has ninety-nine Names, one hundred less one — whoever preserves them will enter Paradise.”
— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, printed page 3/198 of .
The word rendered “preserves” is aḥṣāhā, from iḥṣāʾ (إِحْصَاء) — literally to count something in full, leaving nothing out. Commentators on this hadith read it as covering more than recitation: knowing the 99 Names by heart is the first layer, understanding what each one means is the second, calling on Allah and praising Him by them — the practice this whole post is about — is the third, and letting a Name actually change conduct is the fourth. A person who knows that Allah is al-Raḥīm (the Merciful) but shows no mercy has counted the Name without preserving it.
The two prayers above both call on the whole of who Allah is — His Oneness, His freedom from imperfection. A request can also be aimed at one Name that matches the need in front of it: someone seeking forgiveness reaching for Yā Ghafūr (O Most Forgiving), someone seeking provision reaching for Yā Razzāq (O Provider), someone seeking healing reaching for Yā Shāfī (O Healer), someone facing a hard decision reaching for Yā Laṭīf (O Subtly Gentle One), someone afraid for a person or a matter reaching for Yā Ḥafīẓ (O Protector). More than one Name can be paired in the same prayer when more than one thing is needed at once — a sick person, for instance, has reason to call on both Ash-Shāfī and Ar-Raḥīm in the same breath.
One point of Arabic grammar is worth getting right here, since it changes how the Name is actually said aloud: the definite article al- that normally sits on these Names in a sentence — al-Ghafūr, al-Razzāq — is dropped when the Name is called upon directly. Reciters and teachers of duʿāʾ say Yā Ghafūr, not Yā al-Ghafūr; Yā Razzāq, not Yā al-Razzāq. The vocative already does the work the article would otherwise do.
None of this requires knowing all 99 Names before praying with any of them. The man near the Prophet did not recite a list — he reached for the two or three Names that mattered to what he was affirming, in words he already knew. That is a lower bar than it sounds, and it is the bar this method actually sets.
Two prayers, a handful of centuries apart, share one method: name who Allah is before naming what you want. A stranger did it near the Prophet and was told his prayer could not be turned away. A prophet did it from inside a fish and every report of it since has carried the same promise. Between them sits a whole vocabulary — 99 Names — available to anyone willing to learn what each one means and call on Allah by it.
Readers can look up any of Allah’s Names as they occur across the Qur’an, verse by verse, at /quran.
We have tried to render every verse and every hadith here exactly as it stands in the sources, but we are not immune to error — if something above is mistaken, we would rather be corrected than left uncorrected.
O Allah ﷻ, we ask You by Your Most Beautiful Names to keep us among those You love and with whom You are pleased.