The Alarm That Rings Five Times

Do you remember those fifteen minutes?

The appointment you kept because a manager was waiting for you, or because your name would be called in the lecture hall. Then your other appointments: the closed book, the shoes by the door, the call you promised your mother. Each one you missed weakened your trust that your word would become action.

If you cannot keep fifteen minutes a day, how can you convince anyone you can handle the other eight hours? That is the manager’s reasoning. We understand it perfectly as long as it comes from someone else.

In chapter 1, you heard the alarm five times in one morning. Between each ring, a hand postponed what you had decided the night before. Now the picture widens: five calls spread through the day, each asking you to put down what you are doing and get up. They are the calls to the five daily prayers.

You Are the Same Person

You are the same person when you promise to pray and when you promise to walk, read, or call your mother. So we look at prayer here as we have looked at every promise before it. It is the clearest example of everything in this book: an appointment whose conditions are already in place. It has a set time you do not need to choose, a call announcing its start, and a place to stand, in a mosque or any clean place. Together, the five prayers take fifteen to twenty minutes of your day: about as long as the appointment this book began with.

Yet this appointment may be the biggest promise we break. We know its time and place. We hear its call. Then we miss it through the same mechanisms we have seen throughout the book. The call rises and we say, “In a little while,” just as Karim’s thumb used to silence his running alarm. The lawyer finds a reasonable explanation: the work in front of us cannot wait. A busy day becomes an exception we call “Just this once.” If we miss a prayer, we hear the voice that says, “Since I’ve already ruined it, it makes no difference,” and we miss the next one too.

In chapter 1, we saw through Bandura’s work that experiences of success and failure help shape your sense of your ability to act¹. That does not mean missing one appointment passes judgment on your whole life. It asks you a more precise question: Who are you when you make a promise? And what small action can you add today to your record of promises kept?

Nor do we claim that keeping up your prayers is enough on its own to make you stick to your diet or your studies. Evidence that training in self-control carries over to other areas is mixed². Every promise needs its own work and preparation, even if an earlier promise has taught you how to begin.

The tool is the same one we have tried with every promise in this book. Conditions already in place cannot move your feet for you. What needs arranging is how you will get there: where you will be, what you will put down, and how you will keep the previous task from swallowing the time.

You may keep your work appointment, then leave this appointment to whatever is left of your day. Look at the difference as you looked at The Weekly Record in chapter 4. Name it. Then change what you will do at the next call, without a quick excuse or a verdict on yourself.

Who Is This Appointment For?

The manager’s appointment exists because the manager needs your work. As for our prayers, Allah has no need of them: ﴿وَمَن جَٰهَدَ فَإِنَّمَا يُجَٰهِدُ لِنَفۡسِهِۦٓۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَغَنِيٌّ عَنِ ٱلۡعَٰلَمِينَ﴾ And whoever strives only strives for [the benefit of] himself. Indeed, Allah is free from need of the worlds. (Al-‘Ankabut 29:6)³. The benefit is ours. This book considers just one part of it: getting up from your work and your screen five times a day, so you regain a say in a day that nearly carried you along from start to finish.

Five Anchors for Your Day

In chapter 2, we looked for steady anchors to attach a small habit to: morning coffee, arriving at work, finishing dinner. All along, you had five anchors that return every day: the calls to prayer. Adhan times shift with the sun over the year, but the calls keep coming. The cue is the sound, not the number on the clock. Check their times where you live, then arrange what happens around them.

You can open your study materials after Fajr, arrange your break at work around Dhuhr, walk after Asr, leave time for your family after Maghrib, and start bringing your day to a close after Isha.

Do not load the five anchors with twenty promises. Choose one habit to follow a prayer you keep, and have its book or shoes ready before the time comes. When the prayer ends, you know the next step.

In Lina’s new office, the Dhuhr adhan reaches her from a mosque on the street opposite, through the same window whose light falls on her paper. In Ramadan she would get up for it before the muezzin had finished his call. After Eid it began arriving in the middle of a design, and she would tell herself, “In a little while.” Then a meeting would come, then a change a client asked for, and she would pray Dhuhr in a rush, minutes before Asr, her eye on the clock.

She noticed this the day she reviewed her week the way she used to review accounts: she had not been a minute late to the morning meeting, and she had risen at the call to Dhuhr only once. She remembered the sheet on the fridge after Eid and did not write a new list. She chose Dhuhr alone.

On Sunday morning she put her old university notebook and a pencil in her desk drawer, and a few minutes before Dhuhr she performed wudu. When “Allahu akbar” rose from the street opposite, she saved the file and went to the prayer room at the end of the corridor. A colleague asked, “Where to?” “Fifteen minutes, and I’ll be back,” she said. After the prayer she did not return to the company file. She opened the notebook and drew the window the adhan had come through.

On Wednesday a meeting ran until nearly Asr, so she prayed Dhuhr when she came out of it, in a rush, as in the weeks before. She did not turn Wednesday into a verdict on her week; on Thursday she saved the file at the first “Allahu akbar.” By the end of the week there were four windows in the notebook, each with a different light in it.

Every prayer you keep is a promise fulfilled. As you keep more promises, your word may regain some of its weight with you. You said you would get up. Then you did. Now you have an action to remember when you promise something else.

What We Learned Comes Back with You

Who are you when you make a promise? In Part One: a time, a place, a witness, a steady anchor, a line you do not negotiate, and a record of what you did. In Part Two: your friend “Tomorrow,” the lawyer, the dessert you reward yourself with, and what you chose from what you inherited. In Part Three: the action is distinct from the judgment on the person who did it; anger from the word; a passing thought from a decision; what you can control from what you cannot. In Part Four: who you perform for, what you fail to see in what you have, the exception you grant yourself, and who claims the right to choose for you. In Part Five: from the season to the day, from the screen to dinner, and from the lapse to the next appointment.

Lina arrived on the Saturday her father had invited her over after Eid. For the first time, he had invited her without anything in his home needing repair. He had put a small wooden box on the table. “Where’s the screwdriver?” she asked. “Nothing’s broken today,” he said. She sat down and put her old university notebook on the table, with the week’s four windows in it. He kept the box closed, running his thumb over the brass lock. Through the kitchen doorway, she could see the spice jars, their labels in his slanting handwriting. She asked the question she had carried since examining what she had chosen and what she had inherited. “Why did you choose accounting for me, Dad?” “You were good with numbers,” he said. “That answers half the question.” He smiled, then took a small key from his pocket.

He opened the box. Inside were brushes with hardened tips. Some had stuck together. She lifted one; a second came with it. “I didn’t wash them on my last day,” he said. He tried to separate the two brushes, then left them. “All these years, and you never found time to wash them?” she asked. “Don’t start making me a schedule.” She laughed. He had recognized the tone.

He told her about his first job, and a man with the steadiest hand her father had ever seen. The man painted shop names, leaving him to mix the colors and clean the brushes. Once, when the man was away, her father painted a whole sign. The man came back, stood looking at it, then handed him the day’s pay. The sign stayed there for years. Her father liked to walk down that street and lift his head before he reached it.

“After that, I painted signs on my own. My father came by once and saw the paint on my sleeve.” He paused, looking at the brush in her hand. “He said, ‘This is no career.’” “Then what?” she asked. “He found me another job.” He pointed to the brushes. “I didn’t wash them that day.” The kettle whistled in the kitchen. Neither of them got up to turn it off.

“I chose accounting for you so no one would say that to you,” he said. She set the brush on the edge of the box. “But you said it another way.” He looked at her and did not go back to talking about the respectable company. She opened the notebook to a logo she had drawn in her second year and turned it toward him. Their Saturday hour had dwindled to ten minutes. This time, Lina stayed with him for more than an hour. He brought her tea on a small saucer. She said it would be good for mixing colors. “Take it,” he said, “even if it is my last tea saucer.” She looked for an empty glass, filled it with warm water, and soaked one brush in it. She promised him nothing. She moved the brush through the water, and the old color began to dissolve.

After returning from his family’s home to his student room, Karim put his “For my father, or for me” document under the lamp. He read the line he had left unsigned months earlier. He moved the time for closing the game from the “For my father” column to “For me,” and wrote underneath: “I close it because I want to wake up without hitting snooze five times.” His roommate asked from the bed, “Finished?” “Started,” Karim said. He picked up the pen and signed: Karim. Then he opened the prayer timetable and chose Dhuhr as the first anchor for tomorrow’s plan. He wrote down the place, what he would put down beforehand, and two pages afterward. He took his “I don’t smoke, even on nights out” card out of his wallet. Its edges were worn smooth. He put it beside the sheet and capped the pen.

Before going to sleep, Karim opened the front pocket of his bag for the first time since summer. He found the drawing his sister had slipped inside: the same table, and a bigger blue boy. He hung it above the desk by the lamp, where he had propped up the first drawing a year ago. No phone on the desk. Tomorrow’s plan lay beside the lamp. His signature at the bottom of the document had dried. He opened the drawer and took out the envelope. He ran a finger over its worn corner, then tore open one end and pulled out a folded sheet. He spread it under the light.

It was an old sheet, yellowing at the edges, soft along its folds. The handwriting was his father’s, but smaller and less steady than the writing on the fridge schedule.

At the top: “This year.” Below it, three lines: Running. A book every month. English.

The same list Karim had written on his phone at the beginning of the year, line for line.

Beside “Running” were fourteen small marks, one for each morning. After them came empty squares, drawn with the same care all the way to the bottom of the page.

At the bottom of the sheet was a line in newer ink, in the handwriting he knew as his father’s:

“I wrote this at your age. No one asked me.”

Six words in Arabic. Karim counted them once, then propped the sheet against the lamp beside his sister’s drawing, where he could see it.

In the morning, he took his running sheet down from the wall, with its marks and zeros, and put it beside his father’s sheet. He photographed them together, sent the picture to his father, and wrote underneath: “Sunday, six. I’ll ask you: Did you run?”

The reply came a minute later: “Well done.”

Phone in hand, Karim waited for the word that always followed.

It did not come.

Who in your life wrote their own list and was never asked about it? Ask them one question this week, without a “but.”

The Door Is Open

If you are unsure about prayer itself, rather than its timing, write down your question and find someone who will listen and answer with knowledge and honesty. You do not have to pretend to be more certain than you are. If someone speaking in religion’s name has hurt you, you can protect yourself from that person and consider prayer away from their voice, without returning to it.

Get Up… Even for the Hundredth Time.

﴿فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا ۝ إِنَّ مَعَ ٱلْعُسْرِ يُسْرًۭا﴾ For indeed, with hardship [will be] ease. Indeed, with hardship [will be] ease. (Ash-Sharh 94:5–6)⁴.

The Prophet ﷺ was asked which deeds Allah loves most. He said: “The most regular constant deeds even though they may be few”, and said: “Don't take upon yourselves, except the deeds which are within your ability” (al-Bukhari 6465)⁵.