To really find joy through daily adhkār, I believe you have to invest wholeheartedly in learning classical Arabic.

For me, it meant resigning from my job and making my home in Damascus. My friends advised me to stay and learn Arabic in a university in Virginia 🥱

My parents, however, told me traveling to Syria was a great idea. Of course, I’m going to prefer their advice ❤️

Remember, you’ll never get to watch a heated debate between a Super Salafi and a Super Sufi in a Western college with everyone egging the debaters on with screams of “Jerry, Jerry…!” 🤣

And you’ll never get to watch a wrestling match between a Dagestani and an American brother in your Western dorm.

And, of course, you’ll never get to go through the entire al-Ājurrūmiyyah text, all in Arabic. I’ll never forget the matan:

الكلامُ هو لفظٌ مركبٌ مفيدٌ بالوضع

I am working on cycling through all the duʿās I have memorized during the sujūds of my Salahs, ان شاء الله. They actually help me ask for what’s important!

I also prefer to recite all my duʿās in Arabic using the same duas Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه و سلم taught us.

I find his صلى الله عليه و سلم duʿās perfect for addressing my every situation. I also find the Arabic words he صلى الله عليه و سلم used so much richer in meaning than their translations. These Arabic words open up my imagination.

For example, the Arabic word هوى is often translated as “desire” in English. That is so lame!

It doesn’t capture the feeling of a powerful pull, something that draws you in.

In Arabic, هاوية gives the image of a deep pit, a place of falling. So you have to be careful in life because it is so difficult to resist that pull.

Hawā also brings to mind a strong wind. I imagine myself on a sailboat with the sails open and the hawā pushing my boat forward. I have to set the sails just right so I can travel at a safe speed and not have the boat sink.

Funny the windy meaning makes me think of how our state Hawaii got its name 😎

It also makes me think of dopamine, which is produced by the brain. Dopamine was called the “Molecule of More,” that feeling of always seeking the next reward, like the pull of a slot machine waiting for the three fruits to line up. So you have to be careful once dopamine is released because you don’t want to get trapped in its circuit.

This rich Arabic meaning makes so much more sense when Allah says:

“Have you seen the one who has taken his hawā as his god?”

Here is a beautiful duʿā I use with the word هوى:

اللهم اجعل هواي طابعًا لما جاء به محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم

O Allah, make my hawa conform to what Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم brought.

Dopamine is not good or evil. You just need to make sure you are not hijacked by its circuit, and this dua helps with that.

I just don’t feel as imaginative and spiritually connected when I make duʿā in the two languages I am a native speaker of, English and Urdu.

And, of course, I love making these Arabic duʿās because they were taught by my own beloved forefather, Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم who taught us to say:

اللهم صلى على محمد و علي أزواجه وذريته كما صليت على ال إبراهيم انك حميد مجيد

Oh Allah, praise Muhammad, his wives and his descendants as you praised the family of Ibrahim. Indeed, only you are Ever-praise worthy and Ever- majestic.

(Authenticated by Shaykh Al-Albani, May Allah have mercy
on him).

What an honor! May Allah help me live up to it!

❤️❤️❤️اللهم صلى و سلم على حبيبي محمد

Jazak Allahu khayran for reading so closely, and for asking the harder question the piece deliberately left open.

Three parts here, so let me take them in order, with two caveats. First, I write as a layman who has watched this play out, not as a mufti. Your local imam or a scholar you trust should have the final word, since the ruling turns on details of circumstance.

Second, I write as an observer rather than a participant: I have not used these apps myself, nor sat in a matrimonial event as an “attendee”. What I know of how they play out, I know from watching others at close range, which is worth something, but you should weigh it as that and nothing more.

On the platforms themselves: I have no adversity with them, and I’d be sorry to have the article read as one. For someone in a town with three Muslim families, or a convert with no community network at all, a platform like Zawwaj is not a compromise; it’s the door. The means is neutral. What the piece was warning about isn’t the technology but a particular manner of using it: the infinite queue, the parallel conversations, the open doors nobody walks through. A man in a large city with a masjid full of uncles and aunties manages that behaviour perfectly well without an app. And conversely, someone in real isolation can use a platform with complete seriousness, one person at a time, a clear intention, a defined timeline, and it is a mercy to them. Same tool, opposite outcomes.

On whether it constitutes khalwa: in the strict legal sense, the position of most contemporary scholars is no. Khalwa is physical seclusion, a closed space a third party cannot enter, and a message thread is not that. But I’d take little comfort in the technicality. The prohibition exists because of what seclusion produces: privacy, a lowered guard, the slow drift of speech from purposeful to intimate. A phone in the dark at 1am reproduces every one of those conditions, sometimes more efficiently than a locked room. Some scholars now use the term “virtual khalwa” for precisely this reason. So: likely not khalwa as the fuqaha defined it, and to be treated with the same caution regardless. The more directly relevant guidance is the Qur’anic instruction against softening the speech (33:32), which never required a physical room to apply.

On the wali, and when: two things get conflated here and are worth separating. His role as a condition attaches to the contract itself. The jumhur (Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali) hold the nikah is invalid without him; the Hanafis permit an adult woman to contract her own, though even they consider bypassing him improper. That’s a question about the aqd, and it isn’t really what you’re asking.

You’re asking about the getting-to-know stage, and there no school requires the wali to sit in on every exchange. But early involvement, before attachment forms rather than after, is the counsel of everyone I’d trust on this, and the details of how are best worked out with him and with the scholar guiding the family.

A final word, so the trust is clear. I write none of this from above it; I am working on myself like everyone else. What is sound in this is from Allah; what is mistaken is from me, and I ask His pardon for it. Beyond that, no bearer of burdens carries the burden of another. I answer for my words; each person answers for their choice.

May Allah make it easy for whoever prompted the question, and grant them someone good, and soon.

Jazana wa eyakoum

You’re quite right, we have to be careful what we feed the youth. If we feed them negativity and doubt, they’ll never grow in faith and confidence. We must have faith in them as we have faith in the One who made them.

JazakAllahu khayran. A Praise from a man who has spent years telling this community its stories is a different currency, and I won’t pretend it doesn’t matter to me. It does.

But before the praise, you did something else. The essay asks its readers to be the one who stands at a person’s side and speaks the good they know of him, and you did that here, publicly, under your own name, before I had finished asking anyone to. I noticed. Thank you.

I’m keeping the water bottle. I wrote a whole ballroom trying to show what too much choice does to a person, and you did it with one woman standing in a grocery store aisle. Consider it stolen. My only quarrel is with your worry about the young. This was written for them, and they are here in these comments, reading every long paragraph of it. I think they can be moved by real things. I wrote it because I’ve seen them try.

And the hadith fits this subject well. The Prophet ﷺ looked at a companion in rags and called that the better day. Abundance was never going to be the mercy we assumed, and we were told what it would cost us. Each other.

But the line I’d put above everything else in this thread is yours about your wife. A younger man writing about gratitude is theory. A man saying “why would I ever want anything more,” after the years behind it, earn the right to say it, is evidence. It’s proof the sum works.

May Allah preserve you both, keep Cleopatra unemployed, and make the rest of us the kind who never look behind.

What would your take be about digital or online platforms such as zawwaj for those who live in small Muslim communities or somewhat of isolation?

Would it be considered khlawa with the opposite gender if involved in messages or online sort of communications? How long and at what stage does it require her wali?

or such online / digital sort of communication should have her wali or someone similar status for her to be involved immediately from the start?

Jazakallahu khair

BFG, you clearly have no understanding of what AI writing looks like, or you would not have asked this question. This is about as far from AI writing as you can get.

Furthermore, a generation that has been raised on text messages, short-form video, Tweets and, yes, AI writing – which is balanced, non-controversial and bland – has lost the ability to focus long enough to understand anything complex.

In any case. Yes,, alhamdulillah that women have learned to value themselves, but you’re quite right, far from a scarcity of potential partners, there are too many, and when that happens people either become frozen in confusion, or swipe compulsively to the next one, convinced there is always one better.

There have been studies that show that people are happiest when they have a choice, but not too many choices. I saw a video once of a woman who escaped North Korea and ended up in Texas. She entered a grocery store for the first time. She wanted a bottle of water, but faced with a dizzying array of choices, she did not know what to do, and left without it.

The Prophet (s) once saw Mus’ab bin Umayr (RA) approaching him wearing clothing that was little more than rags. Mus’ab came from a tremendously wealthy family, but gave it all up for Islam. The Prophet (s) wept to see him. He then spoke to the sahabah around him, and said,

“How will you be when a plate of food is placed before you in the morning, and another is brought to you in the evening? And how will you be when you change your clothes in the morning and wear another set of clothes at night, and you cover your houses just as the Ka’bah is covered?”

This was his prophecy of the future, that people would eat more than one meal a day, and wear more than one suit of clothing per day. Which tells you everything about the poverty of those times.

Astonished by this depiction of abundance, the companions asked:”O Messenger of Allah! Will we be better off on that day, or are we better off today?”

He replied: “Rather, you are better off today. Today you love one another, but on that day, you will hate one another and strike the necks of one another.”

SubhanAllah.

As you say, gratitude for the wealth already sitting in front of us is the key. I have a wife who is kind, beautiful, and intelligent. Why would I ever want anything more? Bring me Cleopatra, I will look away. It is said that Rabi’ah Al-Adawiyya was walking one day, when she saw a man staring at her. She asked him, “What is it?!”

He replied, “I have never seen anyone more beautiful than you, are you married?”

Rabia replied, “If you think I’m beautiful, you should see my sister, who’s walking behind me.”

The man looked Behind her but saw nobody. “Where? I don’t see anyone,” he replied.

Rabia replied, “If you were worth marrying, you wouldn’t have looked behind me, you would have said, ‘there can be nobody more beautiful than you.’ Now get away from me!”

Arslan is a tragic figure. I pity him. He strikes me as someone who has slowly surrendered pieces of himself to the addiction. But what can you do? I once knew someone who was addicted to cocaine. There came a point when most of what she said to me was lies. I was forced to cut her off as a friend, even though I felt sorry for her.

As far as Darius’s thoughts of suicide, what struck me was that it wasn’t a grand speech or a miraculous vision that turned him back. It was the thought of a little cat waiting for him somewhere in the world. Sometimes Allah preserves us through the smallest of mercies.

This installment reminds me of the wisdom in our deen and its teachings. Everything Allah prescribes is for a reason, even when we sometimes don’t see it.

P.S. I saw my son’s comment. He only wore the broken flip flops for an hour. My husband spent a small fortune on a pair of Star Wars sneakers, so don’t feel too sorry for him.