Day 2- Surely the Return

A fresh start without denial

The Smith Center is doing what it always does: holding the motion of Harvard Square the way a riverbank holds water—without needing to stop it. Outside, the day keeps spending itself. People hurry with coffee cups and backpacks, phones in hand, faces tilted toward the next appointment. Buses sigh at the curb. Crosswalk lights blink with brief authority. The winter air—clean, sharp—presses the city into focus.

Inside the musallā, the world arrives softened.

Shoes line up at the threshold like small confessions. Coats settle on hooks. The carpet receives our steps with a quiet patience that feels older than all our reasons. I sit in front of my raḥle, the wooden stand open like a small desk for the heart, and the Qur’an rests there with its familiar gravity—light enough to lift, weighty enough to reorder.

Mukābala has its own rhythm: not performance, not haste—just the steady returning of verses, the turn of pages, the humble repetition that makes meaning sink into the bone. A few voices near me move softly, each in their own portion of the recitation, like streams flowing toward one sea. When I lift my head, a window frames the day outside: a slice of Cambridge life—moving, shining, scattering—seen from the shelter of remembrance.

And in that contrast, something clarifies.

Our days often pass like this: we are pulled from one call to another, as though life were an endless series of summons. Sometimes it is as simple and innocent as thirst: drink water, take a bite, rest a moment. Sometimes it is the more complicated labor of repairing the house we have built—brick by brick—when one brick shifts and the whole wall begins to complain. The world, with its restless invitations, sends us from morning to evening into tasks and states and moods. Appetite presses. Ambition persuades. Anxiety organizes. And within the repeating fatigue, a small hope keeps speaking: perhaps this time I will be satisfied; perhaps this time I will finally arrive at ease.

We know how that story often feels.

It feels like running hard for things that will lose their seriousness the moment we truly wake. Like sleepwalkers who catch a sudden glimmer—what if all this is only a dream?—and then lose that glimmer under the loud weight of events. We sweat for what will not keep its promise. We argue for what will not survive the morning. We build small altars to outcomes that were never meant to be permanent.

And when the pressure of personal desire grows tiring—when the nafs exhausts itself in its own appetites—it sometimes changes tactics. It offers a cleaner outfit. A nobler language. It invites us to “higher purposes,” to great causes, to public good, to the preservation of beauty and righteousness. And yes, those aims can be real and luminous. They can also become, quietly, a more organized game of the self: a way to carve one’s name into the memory of people, a way to seek immortality through praise. Without a sincere answer, it becomes difficult to know where all this striving is actually taking us.

This is the climate of the eleven months.

Days and nights succeed one another. Seasons turn. We think of returning to the heart, then something calls us again: provision, deadlines, family, errands, messages, worries that sound urgent because they have learned our voice. We tell ourselves, “Just let me finish this—then I will turn back.” Then the heart, touched by a passing pleasure or a passing fear, finds itself leaning elsewhere again. It is not that the heart is cruel; it is that the heart is responsive. It turns toward what it is shown.

Until Ramadan arrives.

Ramadan does not enter as a quiet suggestion. It arrives like a messenger of the Real—an emissary that walks into the city, into the house, into the bloodstream of the year. It is a guest who deserves honor simply by entering, a divine guest whose presence rearranges the furniture of the soul. The moment it sits, it sits like a sultan on the throne of the heart—calmly, decisively—and the whole inner kingdom begins to reorganize.

It asks for fasting. It teaches patience. It points to the poor with such clarity that the hand starts moving before the mind finishes its excuses. It draws the ear toward Qur’an—toward recitation, toward mukābala, toward a language that does not flatter the ego. It calls us back to prayer, to tasbīḥ, to dhikr, to the slow re-education of attention.

And it offers something the world can rarely offer with honesty: a kind of sweetness that does not require possession.

It makes service feel dignified again—service to God, service to people. It makes the heart taste that there is a joy in worship that carries no hangover. It makes the nafs—tired from months of chasing—begin to see that thirst is not cured by saltwater. The names we ran after, the places we decorated with dreams, the plans we polished until they shone—Ramadan places them gently in their proper scale. The heart does not need to hate them. It simply loosens its grip.

This loosening is a mercy.

And then, somewhere in the middle of the recitation, the Qur’an speaks a sentence that lands like a final diagnosis and a final relief at once:

إِنَّ إِلَى رَبِّكَ الرُّجْعَىٰ

Inna ilā rabbika al-ruj‘ā

Surely the return is to your Lord.

I meet this verse as if I have met it for the first time—though I have known it for years.

It arrives with a strange gentleness. It says, with a clarity that frees the chest: every road you take, every detour you romanticize, every distraction you name “necessary,” every ambition you crown with seriousness—each one eventually empties into one destination.

Return belongs to the Lord.

The verse does not ask me to deny the world. It does something subtler and more precise: it gives the world its place. It gives effort its meaning. It gives urgency its proportion. It invites a fresh start without the theatrics of self-hatred. It invites tawba as a turning—quiet, practical, embodied.

And there, in the musallā, with the Qur’an open before me, I glance again toward the window. People are still rushing across the frame—crossing, turning, disappearing. The city keeps moving like a long sentence without punctuation. And I recognize them as kin. I recognize them as my own reflection: my own running, my own seeking, my own habit of being pulled from call to call. Yet from this small sanctuary, from this “Qur’anic window,” the fleeting nature of everything becomes visible in a softer light. The wisdom does not insult the world; it illuminates it. It shows the passing as passing. It shows the lasting as worthy of longing.

In that illumination, past and future loosen their grip. The things I carried from yesterday, the plans I imagined for tomorrow—so many of them gather themselves into one direction and quietly fall into line. A shy kind of relief moves through me. A sweetness appears, just the taste of turning toward the One who has been calling all along.

Ramadan, in this sense, is a reminder that the call continues through all twelve. God calls His servants through events, through defeats and victories, through openings and closures, through the very phenomena that we often mistake as the whole reality. The call is ongoing. Yet here—inside this musallā, in the companionship of Ramadan, in the cadence of mukābala—the ability to answer feels closer. The heart finds a moment of readiness. The turning becomes simpler. The return feels near.

Everything passes. God remains.

And the final place of ease—the home beyond all the temporary homes—is the Lord.