As-salaamu alaikum,
Tonight's video ended with a question I want to start this email with:
The last time you did something good and no one noticed — what happened inside you?
That reaction — whatever it was — is one of the most honest pieces of data you have about the state of your intention. Tonight, I want to go deeper on what that data means, and what to do with it.
The hadith that should keep you up at night
In the video I mentioned that the Prophet ﷺ described riya as what he feared most for his ummah. I want to give you the full hadith, because the version most people know is abbreviated — and the full version is significantly more alarming.
The Prophet ﷺ said: "Shall I not tell you of what I fear for you more than the Dajjal?" The companions said: Yes, O Messenger of Allah. He said: "Hidden shirk. That a man stands to pray and beautifies his prayer because he sees another man looking at him." (Ibn Majah — sahih)
More than the Dajjal. More than the one-eyed false messiah who will emerge at the end of time and lead people astray with claims of divinity.
More than that — the Prophet ﷺ feared riya.
Why? Because the Dajjal is external. He comes from outside. The believers were told: when the Dajjal appears, flee from him. Keep your distance. Don't engage.
Riya comes from inside. It grows in the space between your intention and your action. It cannot be fled from. It has to be confronted — directly, honestly, repeatedly — in the privacy of your own heart.
It is so subtle, yet, so dangerous. Even the great scholar of the early generations, Sufyaan ath-Thawri said: “Nothing has been harder for me to deal with than my intention. It keeps trying to change on me.”
That is why it is more dangerous. And that is why tonight's topic deserves more than a video — it deserves the kind of sustained, honest self-examination that I hope this email can provide.
What the scholars said about the stages of riya
The classical scholars — particularly Imam al-Ghazali in Ihya Ulum al-Din and Ibn al-Qayyim in Madarij al-Salikin — identified several stages of riya that are worth knowing, because they map the drift with a precision that is both uncomfortable and clarifying.
Stage 1: Pure riya. The act is done entirely for the audience. There is no genuine intention of worshiping Allah — the whole motivation is the reaction of people. This is the most obvious and the most rare. Most people are not here.
Stage 2: Dominant riya. The act has some religious motivation, but the desire for people's approval is stronger. If no one were watching, the act would probably not happen, or would happen with significantly less effort and care.
Stage 3: Mixed intention. This is where most people actually live — and where the danger is most insidious, because it feels like sincerity. There is genuine desire to please Allah alongside genuine desire for people's approval, and the two are so intertwined that separating them feels almost impossible.
Stage 4: Riya that enters after the deed. The act was done sincerely — and then the person mentions it, or posts about it, or allows others to praise them for it in a way that they enjoy more than they should. The scholars debated whether this corrupts the original deed. The consensus is that it does not nullify it entirely — but it diminishes it, sometimes significantly.
Stage 5: Abandoned deed due to people. The person begins an act of worship sincerely and then abandons it — shortens the prayer, cuts the du'a short, stops the sadaqah — because people are no longer watching. Ibn al-Qayyim said this is a sign that the deed was for people all along.
Knowing which stage you are at is the beginning of addressing it. Most of us, if we are honest, will find ourselves somewhere in stages 3 and 4. That is not cause for despair. It is cause for the sustained, gentle work of tajdid al-niyyah — the renewal of intention — that the video described.
The Bukhari insight — going deeper
The story of Imam al-Bukhari in Baghdad deserves more than the video had time for — because what happened after he left Baghdad is as important as what happened while he was there.
Al-Bukhari left Baghdad alone. He returned to his hometown of Samarkand, and then to a small village called Khartank — a place so obscure that most people who read his books today have never heard of it. He died there, in that village, with almost no one present.
No farewell gathering of thousands. No recognition ceremony. No final lecture to a packed hall. He died in a small village, alone, after years of being misrepresented and driven from the city where he had been most celebrated.
And then something happened that only Allah could orchestrate.
His book — the collection he had compiled with a sincerity so pure that he made ghusl and prayed two raka’at followed by istikharah before recording every single hadith — spread across the Islamic world. Across the centuries. Across continents. Across languages. It became, after the Quran, the most authenticated and most read book in the history of Islam. Billions of Muslims have heard his name. Billions have benefited from his work.
He never saw any of it.
He planted a tree whose shade he would never sit in. And the shade of that tree has covered the entire ummah for over a thousand years.
That is what ikhlas produces — not in every case, not always visibly, not always in this life. But the deed done purely for Allah carries a weight that the deed done for an audience simply cannot match. Because the deed done for an audience receives its reward in the moment of the audience's approval — and that is all it receives. The deed done for Allah is in His hands. And He rewards as He wills, in ways and on timescales that no algorithm can measure.
The 59:19 warning — what forgetting Allah actually produces
I want to go deeper on the ayah from Surat al-Hashr that the video introduced, because I think it is one of the most psychologically precise ayaat in the entire Quran.
"And do not be like those who forgot Allah, so He made them forget themselves." [59:19]
The mechanism described here is not punishment in the conventional sense — it is consequence. When a person replaces Allah as their primary audience with human beings, something happens to their self-knowledge. They lose the ability to accurately perceive their own motivations, their own condition, their own needs.
Because here is what Allah provides, for the person who keeps Him as their primary audience: a mirror. The relationship with Allah — through salah, through du'a, through honest self-examination before Him — is the only relationship in which you are seen completely and accurately. Allah knows what you do not know about yourself. And the person who maintains that relationship has access to a quality of self-knowledge and insight that is simply not available anywhere else.
When that relationship is replaced by the relationship with a human audience — when the primary question becomes not "what does Allah see in me?" but "what do people see in me?" — the mirror is lost. And without the mirror, you begin to lose yourself. You begin to be shaped entirely by external perception, with no internal anchor.
This is what you see in the influencer spiral the video described. The escalating shock value. The willingness to cross any line for attention. The complete loss of the question: what do I actually believe? Who do I actually want to be? Those questions require a mirror. And the mirror requires Allah.
Forgetting Allah is not just a spiritual loss. It is a loss of self. And that — fa ansahum anfusahum — is the corruption Allah warned about.
Tonight's journaling prompts
Prompt 1: The stage check. Based on the five stages of riya described above — which stage are you most honest about finding yourself in? Not the stage you fear, or the one that sounds worst — the one that most accurately describes your actual experience. Name it without judgment.
Prompt 2: The secret deed inventory. Think about the last week. How many acts of worship or goodness did you perform that no one knows about? How many were documented, shared, or mentioned to someone? What does that ratio tell you?
Prompt 3: The Bukhari question. If you knew that your work — whatever you are building right now — would only be recognized after your death, and that you would never see the recognition: would you still do it with the same effort and care? What does your honest answer reveal?
Prompt 4: The 59:19 mirror. When was the last time you sat alone with Allah — in salah, in du'a, in honest self-examination — and asked Him to show you your own heart? That practice is the mirror. Is it part of your regular life?
Prompt 5: Tajdid al-niyyah tonight. Before your next act of worship — salah, du'a, reading Quran, any good deed — stop completely. Check your intention by asking yourself why you are doing this act. Make it clear that it is only for Allah alone; ask Him to help you make it purely for His sake alone.
Then do the deed. Notice what changes.
Resources
Ihya Ulum al-Din by Imam al-Ghazali — his chapter on riya is the most comprehensive treatment in the Islamic tradition. An English translation is available. Read at minimum the opening section
Madarij al-Salikin by Ibn al-Qayyim — his treatment of ikhlas as a station on the path to Allah is unsurpassed. The English translation by Imam Zaid Shakir covers the relevant sections accessibly
Kitab al-Ikhlas wa al-Niyyah in Sahih al-Bukhari — read the opening hadith of the entire Bukhari collection: "Actions are by intentions." Then read it again. Then ask yourself how many of your actions today were preceded by a conscious intention directed toward Allah
The story of Imam al-Bukhari — search for a full biographical account. Understanding the full arc of his life — the persecution, the isolation, the death in obscurity — makes his legacy more not less remarkable
One more thing
Al-Bukhari said: "I came with an intention, and I didn't want to abandon my intention."
The hall was empty. Baghdad had turned against him. Everything he had built in that city was gone.
And he sat down and began reciting hadith to no one.
That image — a scholar alone in an empty room, teaching because the intention was for Allah and the intention didn't change just because the audience disappeared — is the image I want to leave you with tonight.
Your audience will fluctuate. Your following will go up and down. The people who validated you yesterday will scroll past you tomorrow. The recognition you received last week will be forgotten next month.
The intention — if it is genuinely for Allah — does not fluctuate with any of that. It is anchored to something that does not change.
Be like Bukhari in the empty room.
My inbox is open. Just reply.
May Allah purify our intentions, accept our deeds, and make us of those whose work outlasts their lives. Ameen.
— Dr. Ali