In this episode I discuss my brief participation in the the conference, If He Were Among Us, put on by the Rahma Center in Lake Forest, CA. I noticed that many of the participants were asking about perfection as it related to following the Prophet ‎ﷺ. I share a few reflections in this post-Fajr talk from this Sunday, August 30th, 2026 for our Fajr Club & Breakfast.

The ḥadīth is the one collected in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī:

My thanks to Shaykh Atef and the Rahma Center for inviting me to share a few thoughts.

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By nature, we love an underdog. When a sports team “beats the odds” we love to cheer for them even if we were booing them just a week ago for losing. When momentum builds—whether in a political campaign, a business venture, or a spiritual/religious experience—it is easy to ride the bandwagon and pledge to the promise of future exploits. Yet the Qur’ān and Islamic ethics treats unfulfilled speech not as harmless optimism, but as a critical spiritual and legal liability.

A Little Backstory Behind Sūrah al-Ṣaff

Sūrah al-Ṣaff opens with a divine rebuke of those who were bragging about their exploits and their hollow promises they were making to God and the Prophet ﷺ:

In his tafsīr, Imam al-Qurṭubī explains that this verse emerged during a pivotal moment in Madīnah. Following the miraculous underdog victory of the Prophet ﷺ and the Muslims at Badr, bandwagon enthusiasm surged. People began over-committing, swearing that if another battle arose they would sacrifice everything just to be there, yet when the Battle of Uḥud came, many retreated. Others engaged in outright hypocrisy and deception, taking credit for feats of valor they never actually performed. One man even claimed he had killed a combatant at Badr when he was never there.

al-Qurṭubī categorizes speech that departs from reality into two categories:

• Kadhib: Falsely claiming credit for sacrifices or work you never completed.

• Khulf: Making bold vows in an emotional rush, only to quietly abandon them when execution requires real effort.

The Four Categories of Commitments

Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) classifies human pledges into clear legal and ethical rulings:

• Unconditional Vows (Nadhr Taqarrub Mubtadaʾ): A direct, voluntary devotional vow made to Allah (e.g., “I owe a fast for Allah’s sake”). This is universally binding by scholarly consensus (ijmāʿ).

• Conditional Vows (Nadhr Muʿallaq): Pledging worship contingent on securing an outcome (e.g., “If my business succeeds, I will donate $X”). Imams Mālik and Abū Ḥanīfah hold that once the outcome occurs, fulfillment is non-negotiable.

• Causal-Linked Promises (Waʿd Manūṭ bi-Sabab): A pledge made to another that induces them to take financial or logistical action (e.g., “Sign the lease, and I will cover the first month”). Because the other party incurred liability relying on your word, this promise is legally binding by consensus.

• Standalone Promises (Waʿd Mujarrad): A bare commitment with no prerequisites. While Imām Mālik noted it may not always be judicially enforceable in court (qaḍāʾan), breaking it destroys one’s nobility, spiritual integrity, and personal honor (makārim al-akhlāq wa-ḥusn al-murūʾah).

The Wisdom of Sustainable Consistency

We often default to dramatic promises because we mistake momentary inspiration for genuine capacity. When a Bedouin came to the Prophet ﷺ asking if fulfilling only the baseline pillars of Islam without additional voluntary devotions would grant him Paradise, the Prophet ﷺ affirmed that it would (recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim no. 11, English/Arabic).

True spiritual and religious maturity lies in recognizing your limits, guarding your tongue, and delivering reliably on the baseline rather than building a reputation on unfulfilled hype.

Sūrat al-Maʿārij offers a sobering picture of the Day of Judgment:

• a day when when a woman would abandon her own child;

• a day when I man would offer his own mother as ransom to escape the Fire!

But the Sūrah also teaches us how to live before that day arrives.

In this post-Fajr khāṭirah, we reflect on the relationship between īmān and security and why both hardship and prosperity are tests: it’s all in how you look at it.

Allāh singles out al-muṣallīn—the people of prayer—as those capable of remaining steady through both. Ṣalāh, the daily prayer, particularly when practiced in congregation (jamāʿah), produces the kind of people who give others their rights, who honor their trusts, speak truthfully, and remember their ultimate accountability before Allāh.

Sūrah al-Maʿārij also offers an important lesson for Muslims living amid hostility and ridicule: confront evil when necessary, but do not allow those who oppose Islam to determine your sense of security, belonging, or self-worth. Our task is to remain faithful, build together, and remember that our security ultimately comes from Allāh—not from the approval of others.

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Most people relate to new technology one of two ways:

• total surrender,

• or total suspicion.

But there’s a third option. One which doesn’t involve fear, worship, or the complete domestication of our souls.

No different than any other tool, AI and these new technologies should go through a simple but insightful test:

• what does it actually do?

• what does it not …

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A Khuṭbah by Imam Marc Manley

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It’s not just Muslims feeling the gaze of Big Brother these days: it seems everyone everywhere all the time is feeling like we’re all under the every-increasing watchful eye of the Surveillance State. There is no veil from this surveillance. So how should we as Muslims feel about this and what might we do about it?

Build It Local & Live Off the Land

I know this sounds more like a fantasy or an idea, something you’d see on YouTube with someone living an ideal and charming life “off-the-grid” in a van. But after my experience building my own OCR AI tool using Qwen, a tool which runs locally on my laptop, this might be an opportunity for Muslims to explore the open-source space and stake out our claim.

We cover this and more in Episode 51 of the Middle Ground Podcast.

Here’s some items of interest we think you might want to explore:

• deflock.org: an open-source project mapping license plate readers.

• Rialto police make late-night TV thanks to irresponsible surveillance (warning some profanity).

• What is a panopticon? We thought you’d never ask!

• For more info on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) app (an AI design pattern that improves large language model [LLM] accuracy by fetching relevant facts from external sources such as PDF’s) that I’ve built, watch this video:

• Islamic Economics as an answer to the ribā/usury/ vs. mutual-risk/muʿāmalāt model. Let’s move away from a casino economy.

• Elevate your critique: Muslims, including myself, have been shouting “western!, western!” from the rooftops for God knows how long but we’ve got to elevate our critique because in many ways the world quietly moved past our static critiques, stealthily creating a world which is completely western: the only difference now is to which degree of westerness are we talking about?

Sūrah al-Anʿām and The Human Epistemic Trap: The “Courtroom” Fallacy

As we mentioned last week, this Chapter is a complete rebuttal of the kafir, n…

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This Sunday I returned to hosting our Fajr Club Breakfast at Middle Ground and teaching our tafsīr class: Understanding the Qur’ān. We resumed with the beginning of the Sixth Chapter, Sūrah al-Anʿām.

The chapter of the …

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al-Salāmu ʿalaykum everyone. It might be almost August but it’s a new start for us here at Middle Ground! Yes, we’re back with new classes, activities and a new website.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive…

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Welcome [back!] to Episode 50 of the Middle Ground Podcast with Imam Marc Manley and brother Dawud Aleman. We discuss our absences, life in the intervening year or so, and how we still cultivate hope and faith in the ridiculous times we’re living in.

Watch the podcast on YouTube as well:

Welcome back to another episode of the Middle Ground Podcast. This one will be short and sweet as I share some feedback from a brother who reached explaining that he felt burnout and longing from ideological fatigue.

al-Ḥamdulillāh it was my pleasure to speak at the 10th Annual Family Symposium for Muslim Family Foundation: Roots of Wellness, alongside Dr. Deana Helmy, sister Ahlam Gheith and Shaykh Ḥasan Radi.

Being a non-professional I wanted to bring a somewhat different perspective to the table to challenge and, in shā’ Allāh, improve how Muslim, mental health professionals and otherwise, look at and trust the wester secular approach to healing the human soul.

In the talk I referenced mainly two works of interest.

1. Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. Basic Books, 2000.

2. Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. Harper Torchbooks, 1968.

Many thanks to Muslim Family Foundation, Dr. Ali Al-Saadoon, the panel members, all who attended and especially brother Mohamad Nasser for inviting me.

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al-Ḥamdulillāh I was invited again by the gracious folks at Masjid al-Fatiha of America, located in Azusa, California. I’ve worked closely with this family-run masjid for years.

al-Salām ‘alaykum everyone. Just a few words on the recent phenomenon of allegedly fake AI videos of war criminals and what we should think of that.

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The following are some words I put together regarding a discussion at ifṭār the other night:

المسلم المعاصر في خُسران من وجوه كثيرة، ومن أبرزها أنّه يتفكّر كإنسان مغلوب. فبدلا من أن يذُمّ نفسه ينظر إلى الآخرين: مثلا الكفار أو اليهود. ولا ينظر إلى نفسه؛ فيُسقط مشكلاته كلها على الآخرين ولكن الأسلوب القرآني أن يَدينَ الإنسان نفسه. وإضافة إلى ذلك لا يرى في…

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Let’s take a quick look at the rules which apply to numbers and counting objects.

Numbers One and Two

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Many Muslims today speak of “love”: for Allāh, for the Prophet ‎ﷺ, etc. And while having love for Allāh and the Prophet ‎ﷺ are indeed noble ambitions it would also seem that the current emphasis on love has come at the cost how we see obedience. It would seem for some Muslims today that talk of fearing Allāh and striving for obedience is akin to negativity. Others have conflated love with mercy. But the Qur’ān, however, addresses these qualities quite differently and separately.

If we examine how the Qur’ān commands us to fear Allāh, such admonitions are unencumbered and straightforward. In contrast love is conditional:

or that there are those that Allāh loves, and those He doesn’t:

and

In other words love—especially love to Allāh and/or His Prophet ‎ﷺ is proven through devotional commitment (ittibāʿ) and obedience (ṭāʿah), not merely self-selecting sentiment.

As for mercy (raḥmah), Allāh says that it encompasses everything:

In fact, Allāh’s mercy—in this life—extends even to those who don’t believe in Him or even reject Him outright. Yes, Allāh shows mercy to the believer and the non-believer alike (though not necessarily equally). In fact, as we leaned in our Satuday ʿaqīdah class, Allāh’s mercy can be understood as having two branches if you will: the aforementioned all-encompassing mercy for everything and everyone in this life, and a specially mercy reserved for those who believe in Him for the Next Life. The point being here is that we should not collapse mercy into love.

A great example of this is the sotry of Qarūn (Korah, in the Bible). His story illustrates how misplaced love—especially of wealth—can blind judgment. Those around him admired him, even coveting to be in his place. But when Allāh caused the earth to swallow him, they realized that Allāh alone expands and constricts provision. In fact, in the Qālūn (Madanī) reading of the 82nd verse, we see an additional highlight that differs from the Ḥafṣ reading,

in the reading according to Qālūn, it becomes,

In the latter case, the verb in the passive voice underscores our powerlessness and the need for fear in order to sober and reorientate our hearts.

So much of today’s “spiritual” discourse turns faith into a dopamine-trap where we seek to obtain, or in some cases, avoid, a certain mood. On this treadmill of mood chasing fear is always “bad,” love is always “good.” But what we are in need of today isn’t just obtaining the perfect “vibe” but instead, we need to be taught the skills which are necessary and conducive to contemplation and reflection. We need to return to a knowledge-based engagement with the Book of Islām which means we’re going to have to study. Systematic study. Yes, we’re going to have to learn the language of revelation—Arabic—because everything in our Dīn flows from the Qur’ān in its language (as well as the Sunnah). These sciences of revelation are not the tools of gatekeepers; they are the tools by which we can authentically and effectively contemplate (tadabbur) and reflect (tafakkur) with consistency and discipline, not just sentiment.

It goes without saying that we all need an emotional bond with the Qur’ān but feelings built on hawa (emotions/passions) and speculation won’t suffice in and of themselves. Real attachment grows out of consistent and rigorous learning. Beware of performative “piety” that entertains yet leaves you without acquiring the tools to learn. Seek teachers who impart methods, not just stories. The onus is on you to choose paths and mentors that raise the waterline of knowledge so you can truly engage this Book with is “guidance for the God-fearing” (hudan lil-Muttaqīn).

This short talk is meant as an invitation, not an admonition. A pray that we can all build a sturdy foundation of knowledge from which love can spring deep from within that well.

Ask yourself: why would anyone settle for junk when a far greater feast awaits? I wrestle with this analogy every time I take my daughter for sushi. Once she came to know “the good stuff” she’s no longer satisfied with grocery store sushi. Only the good stuff.

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There’s no doubt that modern psychology and psychotherapy have influenced and changed how people think about God and their religious traditions. Muslims are no different in this matter. In fact, the only question which remains is to what extent is the impact and what might be the remedy and how we might return to a more authentic understanding of the …

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