As-salaamu alaikum,
In tonight’s video, I talked about the story of the young man who was challenged to carry a bowl of milk across town without spilling any milk. He succeeded, but learned the greater lesson: as he was so focused on not spilling the milk, he avoided the distractions in the town and did not look at the haram. This is the visual representation of taqwa – being so focused on not failing in your obedience to Allah that you don’t have time to get distracted by temptations and doubts.
We ended with a du’a I want to start this email with:
Ya Allah, I want to carry this carefully. Make a way out for me from where I cannot see one.
That du’a — made sincerely, from a heart genuinely trying to carry the bowl — is the beginning of taqwa. Tonight I want to go deeper on what that actually looks like in a life. Not as theology. As daily practice.
The definition that changes everything
I want to give you something in the email that the video didn’t have time for — the full classical treatment of the definition of taqwa, because I think the more you understand where the definition comes from, the more it becomes something you can actually use.
The word taqwa comes from the Arabic root w-q-y — wiqayah. Protection. Shield. Guard. The verb ittaqa means to protect yourself, to shield yourself, to guard yourself from something harmful.
This is why the scholars translated it the way they did. Taqwa is not a passive state of awareness — it is an active posture of self-protection. You are doing something. You are guarding something. You are carrying something carefully.
Hence, the report from Abu Salih who reported: A man said to Abu Huraira, may Allah be pleased with him, “What is taqwa?” Abu Huraira said, “Have you ever taken a thorny path?” The man said yes. Abu Huraira said, “What did you do?” The man said, “If I saw thorns, I would avoid them, pass over them, or stop short of them.” Abu Huraira said, “That is taqwa.” (al-Zuhd al-Kabīr)
That image — the gathered garment, the careful step, the active protection — is taqwa. Every time you encounter something that could harm your book of deeds and you step around it, gather yourself, choose the safer path — that is taqwa in practice.
The fear conversation we need to have
I want to go deeper on something the video introduced — the Ibn al-Qayyim bird analogy — because I think it addresses one of the most consequential theological distortions affecting Muslim teens in the West right now.
Living in the west, we have been taught, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that fear doesn’t belong in our relationship with Allah. That a mature, loving relationship with God is one that has moved beyond fear. That fear is for children or for the spiritually undeveloped — and that the goal is to reach a place of pure love.
This is a distortion. And it is doing real damage.
Ibn al-Qayyim described the believer as a bird. One wing is the fear of Allah’s punishment. The other wing is the hope for Allah’s mercy and reward. The body of the bird — the core, the thing that makes it what it is — is the worship of Allah because He is deserving of that worship.
A bird with one wing cannot fly. It cannot go anywhere. It circles and falls.
The Muslim who has abandoned fear in favor of a comfortable, unconditional love, is often one who has decided that Allah would never actually hold them accountable, that the consequences described in the Quran are metaphorical or distant or meant for someone else. That Muslim cannot fly because they have one wing.
And here is the practical consequence: without fear, taqwa is impossible. Because taqwa is precisely the practice of protecting yourself from Allah’s punishment — obeying Him with the intention of avoiding what angers Him. Remove the fear and the protection reflex disappears. The thorns stop looking like thorns. The bowl stops feeling heavy.
This is not a call to live in terror. The Prophet ﷺ himself said: “None of you should die except while having good thoughts about Allah.” (Muslim) Hope is real, essential, and commanded. But hope without fear is not Islam — it is wishful thinking dressed in Islamic language.
Fly with both wings.
And this issue of fear was frequently reported by the early Muslims.
Saʿeed ibn Jubayr said: “Truly, fear is that you fear Allah such that your fear comes between you and your disobedience of Him. That is khashyah…” (Siyar ʾAʿlām Al-Nubalāʾ)
And Al-Ḥasan Al-Baṣrī said: “The believer does the best deeds yet is most fearful that his deeds will not be accepted. If he were to spend a mountain of wealth in charity, he would not feel sure of the reward until he sees it. The more righteous and pious he becomes, the more he fears. But the hypocrite says, ‘There are so many people, I will be forgiven, no problem.’ So he does evil deeds, yet holds foolish wishes about Allah.” (Siyar A’lām Al-Nubalā’)
Taqwa and the tests of this world — a clinical observation
I want to share something from my years in the ER that I think illustrates the promise of Surat al-Talaq in a way that makes it clinically real rather than abstractly hopeful.
I have seen people in crisis — medical, personal, psychological — whose internal resources were utterly depleted. People who had nothing left. No reserves. No plan. No visible exit.
And I have seen, across many years, a pattern that I cannot explain medically: the person with a genuine, practiced relationship with Allah — not a performative one or a cultural one — carries something into that crisis that the person without it simply does not have. A quality of steadiness. A capacity to function under pressure that exceeds what their circumstances should allow.
I am not claiming that taqwa prevents catastrophe. The Quran doesn’t claim that either. The promise of 65:2-3 is not that nothing bad will happen. The promise is makhraj — a way out. And rizq min haythu la yahtasib — provision from where you didn’t expect.
A way out is not the same as the problem not existing. It is something that appears inside the problem — an exit that wasn’t visible before. A resource that arrives from a direction you weren’t looking. A door that opens in a wall you thought was solid.
The person with taqwa — who has been carrying the bowl carefully, who has been walking through thorns with their garment gathered — goes into the crisis with a different foundation than the person who hasn’t. Not because they earned a reward. Because they built on something real. And real foundations hold under pressure in ways that other foundations don’t.
That is the promise. And I have seen enough of it to believe it.
The three levels of taqwa — for the person who wants to go deeper
The classical scholars identified three levels of taqwa that are worth knowing — not as a ranking system but as a map of where you are and where you can go.
The first level is protecting yourself from shirk and kufr — from leaving Islam entirely. This is the minimum. The foundation of the foundation. Without this, nothing else stands.
The second level is protecting yourself from what Allah has prohibited — avoiding the haram, fulfilling the fard, maintaining the obligations. This is the taqwa that most Islamic education focuses on. The taqwa of the bowl — carrying your book of deeds carefully, avoiding the drops that would constitute clear abandonment of the obligatory or clear disobedience.
The third level is protecting yourself from everything that distances you from Allah — including much of what is technically permissible. The scholars called this wara' — scrupulousness. The person at this level is not just asking “is this haram?” They are asking “does this bring me closer to Allah or further from Him?” They are not just avoiding thorns — they are choosing the path that keeps them most oriented toward their destination.
Wara’ is the doubtful that can be understood from the hadith of Al-Nu‘mān ibn Bashīr (may Allah be pleased with him and his father) who reported: I heard the Prophet ﷺ say: “The lawful is clear, and the unlawful is clear, and there are matters between them that are doubtful and not many people know of them. Whoever avoids the doubtful matters saves their religion and honor from being blamed, but whoever indulges in the doubtful matters falls into unlawful matters. It is like a shepherd herding his sheep close to a restricted area; they are liable to trespass into it at any moment. Beware, every king has a restricted area, and the restricted area of Allah is His prohibitions. Beware, in the body there is a piece of flesh, if it is upright, the rest of the body follows, and if it is corrupted, the rest of the body follows. This piece of flesh is the heart.” [Narrated by Al-Bukhāri and Muslim]
Most of us are working on the second level. That is not a criticism — it is an honest description of where the work is. The goal is not to skip levels, but to build them genuinely, one on top of the other, without pretending to be at a level you haven’t yet built.
Where are you right now? Not where you wish you were — where you actually are? That honest answer is the beginning of the next step.
Tonight’s journaling prompts
Prompt 1: The root word. Taqwa comes from wiqayah — protection. What specifically are you trying to protect? Name it concretely: your relationship with Allah, your book of deeds, your character, your akhirah. The more specific you can be about what you’re protecting, the more real the practice of taqwa becomes.
Prompt 2: The one-winged bird. Which wing is stronger in you right now — fear or hope? If fear is absent, what has replaced it? If hope is absent, what has taken its place? What would it look like to strengthen the weaker wing without abandoning the stronger one?
Prompt 3: The three levels. Which of the three levels of taqwa are you honestly working on right now? What would it look like to build that level more solidly before reaching for the next one?
Prompt 4: The makhraj. Is there a situation in your life right now where you need a way out — where you cannot see the exit? Write it down. Then write the du’a: Ya Allah, I want to carry this carefully. Make a way out for me from where I cannot see one. Then sit with the promise of 65:2-3 and let it be real rather than decorative.
Prompt 5: The callback. Go back to Night 2 — the imposter syndrome episode. Read or watch it again with Night 26 in your mind. Allah — al-Aleem, al-Khabeer — saw every obstacle you were carrying then. He saw what you had to overcome to get here. What does it mean to you that He saw the specific weight of your specific struggle — not just the outcome, but the effort?
Resources
Surah al-Talaq 65:1-7 — read the full context of the makhraj promise. The ayaat are addressed to specific circumstances of difficulty and the promise runs through all of them. Understanding the context makes the promise feel less like a fortune cookie and more like a covenant
Madarij al-Salikin by Ibn al-Qayyim — his treatment of taqwa as a station on the path to Allah, and his full development of the fear/hope/love framework, is the most complete treatment in the tradition. The sections on khawf and raja' — fear and hope — are essential reading for any Muslim trying to understand how these two things work together rather than against each other
Khalil Center (khalilcenter.com) — for anyone whose “bowl” includes mental health struggles. The makhraj sometimes arrives through a therapist’s door. That is rizq min haythu la yahtasib — provision from where you didn’t expect
One more thing
The young man in tonight’s story came to the shaykh asking for a technique. A tip. A brain hack for lowering his gaze.
What he received was a foundation.
He didn’t leave with a list of strategies. He left with an understanding that reorganized everything else — that made the strategies make sense, that gave them something to rest on.
That is what I hope Night 26 gave you. Not another item for your Islamic to-do list. A foundation. The thing underneath everything else. The bowl you carry into every room, every decision, every private moment when nobody is watching, but Allah always is.
Carry it carefully. Ask Allah to make you of those who carry it carefully. And trust the promise — that the person who carries it carefully will find ways out they couldn’t see, and provision from directions they never expected.
The bowl is in your hands. Walk carefully.
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May Allah make us of the muttaqeen — those who carry the bowl, gather the garment, and find the way out He promised. Ameen.
— Dr. Ali