Şehr-i Ramazan- Intention/niyet

Boston has been handing the day over to night for half an hour now. It is a little after five—one of those February evenings that still remembers the sun, while the cold gathers itself with quiet authority. Harvard Square glows from within: café windows, bus headlights, the small lamps that make the sidewalks feel held. My breath writes brief clouds in the air. Snow along the curb keeps a thin, salt-bright crust, and the trees stand bear with a winter courtesy, as if they have chosen simplicity for the sake of truth.

I walk from the Yard toward the Charles, letting the city loosen its grip on my thoughts. Near Weeks Bridge the river opens like a dark page, and the sky above it carries a pale, rinsed blue—an evening color that belongs to thresholds. I look toward the western edge of light, where the day thins and changes its tone. Tonight, in many places, hearts are doing the same gentle work: turning the eyes outward to find a sign, so the inward can turn with it. The crescent is slender. The search for it teaches a particular kind of attention—careful, patient, alive.

In that attention, the first night of Ramadan arrives—sometimes veiled by cloud, always sensed by the inner weather. Something in me returns, quietly, to the earliest versions of myself: the child who wanted to be a good human being; the young student who felt that “a good Muslim” was less a label than a direction; the theologian-in-training who once believed a clean resolve could carry a life for miles. I remember those first high aspirations the way one remembers the first time the heart learned to stand upright: the posture felt natural, the horizon felt wide, and the soul felt light.

On an evening like this, intention steps quietly into the light, as if called forward by the hush that gathers at dusk.

In the language of the tradition, niyyah—intention—sits at the beginning of every meaningful act. The Prophet’s famous reminder that deeds take their value from intentions has been repeated so often that it risks becoming a proverb; yet it remains, for me, one of the sharpest instruments of spiritual realism ever offered to human beings. It directs our attention to the invisible that shapes the visible. It says: the world may applaud what it can measure, but the heart knows where it is facing. It says: an action carries a body in public, and it carries a direction in secret. That direction is where the act truly lives.

I have come to feel, over the years, that intention is less a single moment of decision and more a form of orientation—a quiet compass that keeps choosing north. The jurists placed intention in the heart because it belongs to meaning, not to performance; it is the inward naming that turns outward motion into worship. And the people of the path—those patient cartographers of the inner world—treat intention as the first step in purification, a beginning that asks to be renewed, refined, and protected.

In their manuals, intention is close to ikhlāṣ: sincerity, the clearing of motives until an act becomes light. The old masters speak of sincerity as something profoundly inward—a secret placed in the heart, guarded from self-display by its very delicacy. Their counsel often arrives in the form of gentle diagnostics: the heart learns to do good with ease, then with quiet, and finally without needing to watch itself doing good. In that progression, you can hear Ramadan’s invitation on its first night. The month asks for a beginning and a cleansing. It asks for a direction and for inner tidying, so that the direction has room to hold.

This matters, perhaps, because our age is crowded with substitutes—echoes of the real, offered in place of what the heart truly seeks.

People seek states of calm, depth, transcendence, and wholeness through many doorways—rituals borrowed from distant traditions, techniques of “mindfulness,” disciplines of self-optimization, the bright-lit industries of personal development. The impulse itself carries a sincerity: a human being wants to feel real again. A human being wants a horizon larger than consumption, larger than anxiety, larger than the self’s cramped mirror. In the secular material atmosphere, the soul still reaches for hāl: a state of presence; a taste of meaning; a sense of inward amplitude.

Ramadan carries an older map for that same longing. It offers, with quiet confidence, a pedagogy of return. It asks the body to fast so the heart can remember. It asks for the appetite to become disciplined so attention can become luminous. It invites the modern seeker into something both ancient and fresh: a month where the ordinary becomes an instrument of depth.

And because I live here—Boston, Cambridge, the rhythms of a New England year—this return has its own textures. There is the early darkness of late winter Ramadan evenings, the river air that sharpens the senses, the campus lights that make the night feel studious, the small communities assembling themselves for ifṭār the way candles gather flame. The city does not pause for Ramadan, and yet Ramadan arrives anyway, and it teaches the heart to carry its own season.

On the first night, the heart often asks: What shall I seek this month?

Sufi literature offers a word that holds this question with both tenderness and force: himma—aspiration, high resolve, the heart’s capacity to aim. Himma is the inner energy that chooses what matters and keeps choosing it. It is a desire made upright. It is long trained toward its true object. The sages say that aspiration attaches itself somewhere; the month of fasting becomes a training in attachment—an upward reattachment, again and again, until the heart finds its steadier altitude.

Kenan Rifâî—late Ottoman, bureaucrat and poet, musician and teacher—says it with a clarity that lands like a bell in the chest: Talebin neyse, o’sun sen. What you seek is what you become. Knowledge gives a person a kind of worth, he says, and seeking gives a person a shape. That line has followed me across years and oceans because it refuses to flatter the ego. It says: the heart’s direction is formative. It says: your longing writes your biography.

So, on a night like this, I listen to my own longing the way I listen to the trees.

What is my talep? What am I truly asking for, beneath all respectable language?

If my seeking narrows to private success, private comfort, private spiritual pleasure, then my Ramadan takes on the smallness of my own containment. If my seeking widens toward mercy—toward God’s pleasure, toward service, toward a trace of healing in the human world—then the month opens outward, and worship becomes a form of presence that others can breathe near.

This is where your intuition about the witnessed world begins to shine with theological discipline. We live in the realm of shahāda, the realm of the seen: outcomes, metrics, appearances, the measurable. The Qur’an repeatedly names God as Knower of the unseen and the witnessed, al-ghayb wa’l-shahāda*, and that naming itself trains the mind. It teaches that the visible is never the whole story. It teaches that the unseen carries weight. It teaches that what becomes evident in conduct passes first through an inward corridor: intention, attention, remembrance, aspiration.

Tonight, intention feels older than my calendar. Older than my adult ledger of gain and loss. Older than the self that learned to negotiate.

The Qur’an tells a scene that the Sufi imagination has guarded like a family heirloom: the primordial covenant, the Alast, the moment when the Lord addresses the children of Adam—*Am I not your Lord?*—and the souls answer, Yes—we testify. Turkish carries this memory in a phrase with its own poetry: Bezm-i Elest, the gathering before all gatherings. The point of this scene, in devotional and mystical reading, is less chronology than orientation. It says: the soul’s deepest “yes” precedes the self’s later distractions. It says: beneath forgetfulness there lives an earlier fidelity.

From this angle, renewing intention at Ramadan’s door becomes something more than self-improvement. It becomes covenant-memory. It becomes a return to the earliest “Yes”—a soft, inward reenactment of that testimony in the language of the present.

And perhaps that is why the crescent matters.

The tradition asks us to begin the month by attending to a sign, by training our eyes to look for something slender and easily missed. A crescent invites a particular kind of perception: carefulness without strain; seriousness without harshness; attentiveness with gentleness. The outer sign becomes an inner instruction: begin again. Begin lightly. Begin truly.

I intend to step back from the tyranny of my small, anxious calculations and to carry a larger concern: to be useful; to be reliable; to be gentle and firm where gentleness and firmness each belong. I intend to let my scholarship serve truth rather than vanity, my teaching serve awakening rather than performance, my music serve remembrance rather than ornament, my institutional labor serve community rather than self-congratulation. I intend to live this month in a way that leaves a trace of mercy in the human world.

On this first night, I find myself choosing an intention that feels both intimate and human—private in its hiding place, public in its fruits. I want this intention to take body. Ramadan is generous with embodiment. Prayer arrives like a steady tide. Dhikr returns like a heartbeat. A small resolve, repeated with care, gathers weight, gathers warmth, gathers direction.

The elders have said it simply: Whoever seeks, finds. So I seek with the best of my himma, and I entrust the rest to the One who turns seeking into arrival. May this month carry us—step by step—toward what we have intended and toward what we have asked for in sincerity.

Men câle nâle.

Vesselam.