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In times of fitan, dhikr (remembrance) becomes an act of resistance, a way of reclaiming consciousness and reattaching the heart to divine meaning.
By PROFESSOR ASLAM FATAAR
A Khutbah delivered at the Habibia Soofie Aastana Masjid, Westville, Durban on October 24, 2025.
An age of turbulence
We live in an age of fitan, of converging crises, moral upheavals, and deep psychic turbulence. The Quran reminds us that fitan is not only chaos or suffering; it is divine testing, a call to conscience and a measure of our moral fibre.
Allah declares that He will surely test us with fear and hunger, with loss of wealth, lives, and fruits, but gives glad tidings to those who remain patient (al-Baqarah, 2:155). These trials are not intended to break us but to reveal who we are when stripped of comfort and certainty. They expose the depth of our sincerity and the strength of our ethical commitments.
Our times are marked by overlapping forms of fitnah. We witness wars and genocides unfolding in real time on our screens — suffering that wounds the conscience of humanity. We see the planet itself groaning under the weight of human neglect — its air and oceans polluted, its soil poisoned, its ecosystems unravelling. We live amidst the rise of racism, xenophobia, patriarchy, and right-wing nationalism, while the moral language of compassion and humility recedes from public life.
Alongside these visible crises lies a subtler, more insidious trial: the advance of artificial intelligence and the digital acceleration of life itself. AI promises efficiency and convenience, but it also risks hollowing out our inner lives. It threatens to detach us from meaning, evacuate consciousness, dull empathy, and automate our moral selves.
Many of us experience this as anxiety and fragmentation. Our devices glow in our palms, but our hearts grow dim. We are constantly connected, yet deeply disconnected — from one another, from nature, and from our Creator.
Responding with remembrance
The Quran calls us to respond not with despair but with remembrance — with dhikr. In times of fitan, remembrance becomes an act of resistance, a way of reclaiming consciousness and reattaching the heart to divine meaning.
Forgetting, the Quran reminds us, is part of being human. Even the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ experienced moments of forgetting — not as moral failure but as divine pedagogy. When he was asked about the story of the Companions of the Cave, he replied, ‘Tomorrow I will tell you,’ but did not say, ‘if Allah wills.’ Revelation was withheld for several days, enveloping him in silence and reflection. When the verses eventually came, Allah instructed him never to say he would do something tomorrow without adding, “if Allah wills,” and to remember his Lord when he forgot (al-Kahf 18:23–24).
This episode reframes forgetting as a divine opportunity for re-orientation. Even in human forgetfulness lies the seed of remembrance. The Prophet’s experience teaches us that forgetting can open the way to remembering, and remembering restores our equilibrium with Allah, with ourselves, and with the world.
To re-member means to make whole again — to reattach what has been dismembered: our moral selves, our social bonds, and our consciousness of the Divine. In an era of fragmentation, remembrance is the thread that reweaves the fabric of meaning.
The threefold dimensions of dhikr
The Quran presents remembrance as multidimensional — bodily, narrative, and ethical.
Bodily remembrance. It begins in ṣalāh, in tasbīḥ, in the rhythmic invocation of the Divine Names. Every subḥān Allah and al-ḥamdu lillāh recalibrates the believer, grounding the self in gratitude and humility. Amidst the noise of machines and the frenzy of technology, these embodied acts of remembrance restore rhythm and balance.
Narrative remembrance. The Quran is filled with stories — of Nūḥ, Yūsuf, Mūsā, Maryam, and the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf — not as relics of the past but as mirrors of our own moral journey. Through story, remembrance becomes the art of reframing trauma, transforming pain into meaning, and locating divine wisdom within loss. The Quran turns memory into healing; it transforms despair into direction.
Ethical remembrance. True dhikr is realised in action. Allah commands believers to repel evil with that which is most beautiful (Fuṣṣilat, 41:34). This is iḥsān — the moral grammar of beauty. Remembrance manifests when we act justly, forgive, and show mercy. It means opposing cruelty with grace, meeting injustice with steadfastness, and building lives and institutions marked by fairness, compassion, and service. Through this threefold remembrance — bodily, narrative, and ethical — the believer becomes a moral presence in the world. Remembrance is not retreat; it is reform. It is not passivity; it is purposeful moral action.
The Prophet’s grammar of iḥsān
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ embodied iḥsān — the excellence of ethical response — amid suffering. He buried his children, endured exile, and faced violence and slander, yet he never turned bitter. He responded to hostility with grace, to cruelty with forgiveness, to hardship with ṣumūd — steadfastness rooted in faith.
Allah commands believers to be patient, reminding them that true patience is only through Him (al-Naḥl, 16:127). This patience is not quietism; it is moral energy. It holds communities together amid the tremors of fitnah. To practise iḥsān is to respond with beauty — to uphold moral clarity without arrogance, to build solidarity without hatred, and to love without expectation of return.
The Quran presents this ideal vividly: “The servants of the Most Merciful are those who walk upon the earth with ease and humility” (al-Furqān, 25:63). To walk lightly upon the earth is to embody the ethics of remembrance. It is to live as if every step bears moral consequence — to tread gently in a wounded world, to speak kindly amidst cruelty, and to carry mercy where there is indifference. This is the horizon of dhikr — remembrance as the art of walking with humility, as those who heal through their presence.
The age of forgetting
Our digital world thrives on distraction. We scroll endlessly, speak instantly, react impulsively. The speed of the algorithm replaces the depth of reflection. Artificial intelligence curates not only our data but also our desires and even our moral horizons. We live in an age of forgetting disguised as connection.
In such a world, remembrance becomes a radical act — a refusal to allow consciousness to be automated. To remember Allah is to reclaim the heart’s sovereignty. It is to insist that wisdom cannot be programmed, and compassion cannot be simulated. Remembrance, in this sense, is resistance against dehumanisation. It restores awareness from distraction and conscience from manipulation. Through dhikr, we recover the moral architecture of the self and the community.
Re-membering as social repair
Remembrance also reweaves the torn social fabric of our time. It is the source of ukhuwwah (brotherhood and sisterhood), unity, and raḥmah (compassion). When remembrance fades, communities fracture; when it thrives, mercy flows.
To re-member is to repair — to build justice where there is inequity, to nurture solidarity where there is division, and to cultivate trust where there is suspicion. In our homes, remembrance manifests as kindness. In our workplaces, it appears as integrity. In our societies, it takes shape as justice. And in all, it carries the rhythm of beauty — to repel ugliness with that which is most beautiful.
Walking gently in turbulent times
The ethical response to fitan is not to escape the world but to inhabit it consciously. To remember is to live intentionally, to speak truth with wisdom, to forgive with dignity, and to act with mercy. It is to transform trauma into tenderness, pain into presence, and fragmentation into faith.
The Quran tells us that in the remembrance of Allah hearts find rest (al-Raʿd, 13:28). This rest is not withdrawal from the world; it is the stillness that allows us to act with clarity amid chaos, to restore humanity amid despair, and to live with humility amid power.
To remember Allah is to walk as His servant — with moral poise, spiritual courage, and ethical beauty. It is to be among the ʿibād al-Raḥmān — those who bring mercy into the world through their words, their work, and their walk.
Re-membering in forgetting
To re-member in forgetting is the believer’s calling in our century of distraction. It is to recover the unity of faith and life, to live as witnesses to divine mercy in fractured times.
Dhikr is the Quran’s antidote to amnesia. It is how we heal — spiritually, socially, and ecologically. It is how we move from despair to hope, from fragmentation to faith, from forgetfulness to beauty. To remember is to live; to forget is to lose the self.
Professor Aslam Fataar teaches in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Stellenbosch University. He writes on ethics, education, and Muslim intellectual thought. This article is based on his khutbah delivered at the Habibia Soofie Aastana Masjid, Westville, Durban on October 24, 2025.
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