al-Salāmu ʿalaykum and welcome to Episode 60 of the Middle Ground Podcast. The following is a short talk by I gave after Fajr Prayer on the meaning of struggle and the importance of making struggle meaningful.

Allāh says in the Qurʾān:

I focused in particular on two terms in this Sūrah:

• striving (kadḥ) and

• how the striving through those difficulties will turn us over to “our people” (inqilāb) in the Hereafter.

“There are people that have never met us, and that are there waiting for us, and—in shāʾ Allāh—by Allah's mercy and His faḍl, if we arrive in that way, we have people that will be the happiest people that will ever want to see us.”

Welcome to Episode 59 of the Middle Ground Podcast. The following is from my post-Fajr talk on October 11th, 2026, discussing memory and remembrance.

The opening passages of Sūrah Yūnus and Sūrah al-Sajdah share several themes, including Allah’s creation of the heavens and the earth, His governance of all affairs, and the repeated invitation to remember Him. This repetition in the Qur’ān serves an important purpose. By encountering the same ideas in different passages, sometimes expressed in slightly different language, we begin to recognize their relationships and develop a more coherent understanding of the Qur’ān. This leads to an important distinction between memory and remembrance (dhikr). Memory allows us to recall information and experiences, while remembrance gives those experiences meaning by connecting them to our awareness of Allah. The Qur’ān repeatedly invites us to engage in this process through the question, أَفَلَا تَتَذَكَّرُونَ (Will you not remember?), encouraging a form of reflection that continues beyond the immediate moment of reading or listening.

The great Muslim scholar, Ibn Taymiyyah, once said:

This episode of the Middle Ground Podcast is from our Friday Night Ḥalaqah (September 25 2026). Imām Marc expands on a ḥadīth qudsī from Friday’s khutbah in which Allāh declares that He has prepared for His devoted worshippers “what no eye has seen and no ear has heard”, tied to the verse in Sūrah al-Sajdah that “no soul knows what has been prepared for it”, the qurrat al-’ayn — the “coolness of the eyes.” The contrast he draws is between this life, which by design leaves us restless with our eyes always chasing novelty, our hearts stirred by trends that expire and the Here-After, where satisfaction never runs out, illustrated by the description of a man in paradise who gazes at his wife for forty years and never tires. So the beginning of training our palate, our souls, to pursue what actually satisfies rather than what merely gives a temporary dopamine hit, is the topic of this episode.

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I came across a post on my X feed today:

Same with this article from yesterday. Gay acceptance is now rapidly dropping in the Netherlands. The real reason is Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigrants are extremely against homosexuality. But media isn’t allowed or won’t ever write that. It’s ironic that the gay acceptance we fought for for decad…

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One of this world’s defining qualities is it’s filled with lies and deceptions. From make-up crises, predictions by so-called “experts”, non-stop political and cultural arguments, scandals, and endless speculation about what may happen next, it becomes fatiguing. Sūrah al-Nabaʾ cuts through that noise by directing our attention to the one event that cannot be postponed or avoided: the Day of Judgment (يوم القيامة)

The Sūrah begins with people in disarray, disputing the reality of the Day of Judgment only to end with a scene completely the opposite: the day has arrived. A day in which the Spirit (Rūḥ/Angel Gabriel) and the other angels standing in ranks, with no one speaking except by Allāh’s permission. And unlike this dunyā every word will be the truth. What once seemed distant has now arrived.

The way in which Allāh presents this Day to us ought to change the way we should think about time and about our deeds. The Qurʾān says that on that Day a person will see:

meaning, we think our deeds and actions are in the past but in reality they’re in the future waiting for us.

But the Quran never leaves mankind without direction and guidance. We should focus on which path we are taking back to our Lord: a path of humility, obedience and servitude, or a path of disobedience, hedonism, and obstinacy:

al-Qurṭubī explains maʾāb (مآب) as “a return to Allāh through righteous action”. The destination is unavoidable: Allah! But the path one takes toward it is still open. The question is therefore not whether we are returning to Allāh—we are—but how we are traveling there, and what we are sending ahead of ourselves before we arrive.

This episode is from our Friday Ḥalaqah. Picking up from where we left off in our khuṭbah today, we discussed not only how humans tend to only change when when presented with a crisis, we also talked about how change takes grit, determination and courage, as found in the statement of the Prophet ‎ﷺ

itself taken from a longer ḥadīth, “The strong believer is better and more beloved to Allāh than a weak one though each has good in them¹.”

1. Taken from Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim no. 2664.

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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