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In this Ramadan reflection, Dr MUJAHID OSMAN explores Sura Al Baqarah 2:153 and the deeper meaning of sabr, prayer and spiritual resilience in times of hardship.
This is the text of a post-Tarawih talk delivered by Dr Mujahid Osman at Claremont Main Road Mosque (CMRM) on Thursday, February 19, 2026.
In the Name of God, Merciful to All, Compassionate to Each. Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. I greet you all with the Islamic greeting of positive peace, tranquillity and compassionate justice: Assalamu ʿalaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
Allah, the Lord and Sustainer of the cosmos, proclaims in Sura Al Baqarah, 2:153:
يٰٓاَيُّهَا الَّذِيۡنَ اٰمَنُوا اسۡتَعِيۡنُوۡا بِالصَّبۡرِ وَالصَّلٰوةِ ؕ اِنَّ اللّٰهَ مَعَ الصّٰبِرِيۡنَ
‘You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer: God is with those who are steadfast.’
According to Muslim scholars al-Wāḥidī (d.1076) and al-Suyūṭī (d.1505), this verse was revealed in the city of Madinah when the early Muslim community faced great ridicule, mockery, and social pressure, especially after the changing of the qiblah (orientation of prayer) from Jerusalem to Makkah (see Sura Al Baqarah, 2:144). After an extended period of persecution in Makkah under the oppressive Quraysh elites, migration (hijrah), ridicule, and social instability, the Qurʾān directs its immediate audience to a source of resilience and divine support: steadfastness (ṣabr) and prayer (ṣalāh). The God of the Qurʾān, in many ways, is an active Creator who tenderly shows up for creation when the going gets tough.
As a member of the Qurʾān’s contemporary audience, how do these words enter my heart and provide succour and light in an increasingly dark, treacherous, and challenging world? On Tuesday morning, my paternal grandmother, Hajjah Soda Osman (d.2026), returned to her Lord. While her death was not sudden or unexpected, it was indeed a jolt to my operating system and a reminder about our individual and collective journeys back to the Source of compassion. As the voorwerk reverberated throughout the room, before her body was taken to the mosque and cemetery, the illuminating words of the Qurʾān broke my façade of okayness, and emotion started to flow from my eyes. The magic of this Book, in its mellifluous recitations, is that it has the power to soften, and the power to heal without self-intention.
‘You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer: God is with those who are steadfast.’ (Sura Al Baqarah, 2:153)
Many scholars, such as the great polymath al-Ghazālī (d.1111), argue that ṣabr is the key pillar, together with gratitude and thankfulness (shukr), of one’s faith in Allah and disposition as a Muslim. As a result, ṣabr is a key virtue in an Islamic ethical vocabulary because it, as Sayyid Qutb (d.1966) says, ‘is required on the personal level for observing one’s religious duties, for resisting temptation, misfortune, poverty, oppression and injustice, and for carrying out one’s responsibilities towards the establishment of the Islamic way of life in society.’
But what does it mean to have steadfastness? How does one really embody the virtue of ṣabr? The linguistic registers of the word might be able to help us. The Arabic word ṣabr is derived from the root verb ṣa-ba-ra and means to bind, to restrain, to tie, or to shackle. The Qurʾān therefore proposes the idea of ṣabara nafsahu, ‘to bind oneself’ or to ‘control oneself’, as a mode of ideal ethical cultivation throughout the vicissitudes of life on this dunya, this human civilisation. Patience in Islam is therefore not passive waiting, but an active moral discipline: holding the self steady in the face of pain, desire, provocation, or delay. But what are you binding yourself to? In my reading, when you practise ṣabr, you are binding your lower self (unrefined self) to the virtues you want to cultivate within your heart, qualities associated with tranquillity or peace (see Sura Al Fajr, 89:27–28). In binding the self, you are practising endurance without instrumentalisation.
In our contemporary world we prize qualities of speed, optimisation and efficacy, instant gratification, and acceleration. However, this blessed month suggests something else. It physically slows down the body and allows the heart to process without external pressures for the now. The fasting of our bodies calls for self-restraint or ṣabr as we abstain from food, drink, and intimacy for God’s love. The fasting day forces us to sit with discomfort and precarity (even if it is from sunrise to sunset), reminding us that we are not sovereign, but totally dependent on the Divine for sustenance. In a culture of instant gratification, fasting becomes a counter-temporal practice. We learn that not all our desires need to be satisfied immediately. Hunger and thirst now become the training ground for our ṣabr, our endurance over time. Ṣabr, as Amina Wadud reminds us, is not sitting with injustice. It is the active seeking of justice, compassion, and tenderness.
The Prophet (SAW) is reported to have said: ‘Fasting is a shield. So when one of you is fasting, let them not speak obscenely or act ignorantly. If someone insults them or fights them, let them say: “I am fasting.”’ (Sahih Bukhari; Sahih Muslim)
As we abstain from food, drink, and intimacy, we also restrain from vices of anger, hostility, and unkindness. While this spiritual practice strips us away from all forms of self-reliance, it also reveals the parts of our character that we want to transform. The Prophet’s advice therefore suggests that maintaining dignity (karāmah) under provocation is a form of ṣabr or steadfastness because it restrains the vices from managing the theatre of your life.
Our classical scholars (al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Kathīr, and al-Rāzī) have divided ṣabr into three forms:
- Patience in obedience to God
- Perseverance in avoiding vice
- Steadfastness in hardship
Fasting is the embodied training of ṣabr: it teaches restraint of desire, endurance through discomfort, ethical self-control in social relations, and God-centred steadfastness in the unseen. In a culture of speed and instant gratification, fasting in the month of Ramadan becomes a counter-practice that reforms the self through patience and prayer over time.
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I conclude with a poem:
I say
Be patient
Because you must.
No sense shaking the tree,
when there are no fruits
ripe enough for you to catch.
Therefore,
‘So be patiently forbearing with a gracious and beautiful perseverance.’ (Sura Al Maʿarij, 70:5)
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