The Morning and Evening Adhkār: What They Are and Where They Come From

“Adhkār” sounds, in transliteration, like the name of one particular thing — as if somewhere a single fixed text exists, handed down whole, called “the adhkār.” It doesn’t, and nothing like it does. Adhkār is simply the plural of dhikr, remembrance, and “the morning and evening adhkār” names a category: short, memorised sayings recited twice a day, at the two hinges of the day, drawn not from one source but from dozens of separate reports, spoken by the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, on different occasions, to different people, and preserved by different narrators. Understanding what these adhkār actually are means understanding two things: why the Qur’an anchors dhikr to exactly these two moments, and how the scattered reports about what to say at each moment became the collections read today.

Two Words for the Same Pair

The Qur’an does not mention morning and evening remembrance once and move on. It returns to the pairing across more than a dozen places, and it does so with more than one vocabulary — as if the concept mattered more to the text than any single fixed phrasing for it. Addressing the believers directly, it says:

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ ٱذْكُرُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ ذِكْرًا كَثِيرًا وَسَبِّحُوهُ بُكْرَةً وَأَصِيلًا

“You who believe, remember Allah often, and glorify Him morning and evening.”

— Sūrat al-Aḥzāb, 33:41–42.

Bukratan wa aṣīlan — morning and late afternoon into evening — is one pairing. Elsewhere the Qur’an reaches for a different one to say the same thing, describing houses where Allah’s name is remembered:

فِى بُيُوتٍ أَذِنَ ٱللَّهُ أَن تُرْفَعَ وَيُذْكَرَ فِيهَا ٱسْمُهُۥ يُسَبِّحُ لَهُۥ فِيهَا بِٱلْغُدُوِّ وَٱلْـَٔاصَالِ

“In houses which Allah has permitted to be raised and where His name is remembered — He is glorified therein, morning and evening.”

— Sūrat al-Nūr, 24:36.

Al-ghuduww is the early brightness right after daybreak; al-āṣāl is the plural of the same aṣīl used two sūrahs earlier, the stretch from mid-afternoon toward nightfall. Two different word-pairs, same two windows, and the Qur’an is not alone in varying its phrasing — the hadith literature that follows does the same thing, describing the identical two moments as “when you rise” and “when evening comes,” or “at the two cool times,” or simply “morning and evening.” That variation is worth noticing before going any further, because it is the reason “the adhkār” could never have been a single fixed text. The Qur’an itself keeps re-opening the subject in fresh language rather than legislating one formula, and the hadith that followed treated the two windows the same way: not as a script to recite, but as two open moments in the day that many different sayings, taught on many different occasions, were all understood to belong to.

An Entire Chapter for Two Moments a Day

That understanding is visible in how the hadith collectors themselves organised their books. Al-Tirmidhī, compiling his Sunan two and a half centuries after the Prophet’s death, gave an entire chapter the heading “What Has Been Reported Regarding the Supplication for When One Wakes and When Evening Comes” — and then filled it with report after report, each attributed to a different companion, each preserving a different set of words. Al-Nasā’ī went further and devoted a whole separate book to the subject, titled ‘Amal al-Yawm wa-l-Layla, “The Deeds of the Day and the Night” — a work that exists for no other reason than to gather, in one place, everything transmitted about what a Muslim says and does at the recurring moments of an ordinary day.

One report inside al-Tirmidhī’s chapter, going back to the companion Abdullah ibn Mas’ud, describes a fixed evening formula the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, used to say:

كَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ إِذَا أَمْسَى قَالَ: "أَمْسَيْنَا وَأَمْسَى الْمُلْكُ لِلَّهِ، وَالْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ، لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ وَحْدَهُ لَا شَرِيكَ لَهُ، لَهُ الْمُلْكُ وَلَهُ الْحَمْدُ وَهُوَ عَلَى كُلِّ شَيْءٍ قَدِيرٌ. اللَّهُمَّ! أَسْأَلُكَ خَيْرَ هَذِهِ اللَّيْلَةِ، وَأَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ شَرِّ هَذِهِ اللَّيْلَةِ، وَشَرِّ مَا بَعْدَهَا. اللَّهُمَّ! إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنَ الْكَسَلِ وَسُوءِ الْكِبَرِ. اللَّهُمَّ! إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ عَذَابٍ فِي النَّارِ وَعَذَابٍ فِي الْقَبْرِ"

“Whenever evening came, the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, would say: ‘We have entered the evening, and with us kingship has entered the evening for Allah; all praise is due to Allah; there is no god but Allah alone, without partner; His is the kingship and His is the praise, and He is capable of all things. O Allah, I ask You for the good of this night, and I take refuge in You from the evil of this night and the evil of what follows it. O Allah, I take refuge in You from idleness and from the worst of old age. O Allah, I take refuge in You from a punishment in the Fire and a punishment in the grave.‘”

— Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, hadith 2723, printed page 4/2088 of Read this page: ت عبد الباقي.

Muslim’s own manuscript preserves a small note about how the second half of that formula reached him: one narrator, al-Ḥasan, says he was separately told by another transmitter, al-Zubayd, that he had retained it from a third, Ibrāhīm, as a continuation of the same wording. It is a minor aside, tucked inside the report itself, but it is exactly the kind of detail that shows what these collections actually are — not a single sentence copied once and repeated, but a chain of individuals, each checked against the others, each contributing a piece that a later compiler had to weigh and place correctly.

Grading a Formula: How the Collections Earned Their Trust

Not every report that made it into a hadith book earned an equal claim on it. In the very same chapter, al-Tirmidhī records a second formula, this one on the authority of the companion Thawbān:

قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ: "مَنْ قَالَ حِينَ يُمْسِي: رَضِيتُ بِاللَّهِ رَبًّا، وَبِالْإِسْلَامِ دِينًا، وَبِمُحَمَّدٍ نَبِيًّا، كَانَ حَقًّا عَلَى اللَّهِ أَنْ يُرْضِيَهُ"

“The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said: ‘Whoever says, when evening comes: I am content with Allah as a Lord, with Islam as a religion, and with Muhammad as a prophet — it becomes incumbent upon Allah to grant him His good pleasure.‘”

— Sunan al-Tirmidhī, hadith 3686, printed page 6/18 of Read this page: ط الرسالة. Al-Tirmidhī himself called this route “ḥasan gharīb.” The editors of this printed edition, examining the same chain on its own merits, judge it weak — the narrator Abū Sa’d Sa’īd ibn al-Marzubān is unreliable — and grade the hadith sound only because two other companions are reported, through entirely separate routes, saying the same thing: a weak supporting report and, alongside it, a sound one reaching Abū Sa’īd al-Khudrī.

That is the ordinary, unglamorous work behind every report in these collections: not simply “the Prophet said it, so it is in the book,” but a chain of named transmitters checked one by one, a verdict on each name, and — when a chain alone falls short — a search across the wider literature for another route saying the same thing before the report is allowed to stand as reliable. Two companions independently attributing the same short sentence to the same evening is treated as real evidence, in a way that one uncorroborated weak chain is not. The word-for-word formula that ends up recommended to worshippers today has already survived that process.

From Scattered Reports to a Single Booklet

None of this happened in one place or all at once. The reports behind the morning and evening adhkār are scattered across al-Bukhārī, Muslim, Abū Dāwūd, al-Tirmidhī, al-Nasā’ī’s dedicated book on the deeds of day and night, and further collections still — each preserving some but not all of what the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, is reported to have said or taught at these two times, each requiring the kind of chain-by-chain scrutiny the Thawbān report above went through. A worshipper reading only one of those books would meet only a fragment of the practice.

What later generations of scholars did, across several centuries, was assemble the fragments. Compilers such as al-Nawawī gathered hundreds of daily remembrances under thematic headings, morning and evening among them, in works meant to be read as a set rather than hunted through volume by volume. Ibn al-Qayyim discussed and defended individual formulas within the same tradition, weighing their chains and their meaning together. In more recent times, small paperback collections built specifically around this material — arranging the morning set, the evening set, and their sources side by side for daily use — carried the same project forward in a form that fits in a pocket. The booklet in wide circulation today is the end of that chain, not its origin: centuries of individual reports, individually checked, gradually drawn together into one accessible order.

That is worth remembering the next time the words themselves are open in front of you. Nothing about “the morning and evening adhkār” was ever handed down as one finished text — it was built, report by report, out of things the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, was seen and heard to say at the edges of ordinary days, preserved by people who cared enough to name exactly who told them and remember exactly what was said. The Quran Gallery Adhkār collection carries that same practice forward, with the sources kept alongside the words rather than left behind them.