Do Not Trifle With Your Prayers

A further mark of these people is that they are all muqīmī al-ṣalāh: they establish the prayer. The prayer is never absent from such descriptions.

If it is only in Ramadan that a person is regular in his prayers, and he thinks it no great matter to miss a few here and there — this is preaching, admittedly, but the matter is of the first importance. Anyone who has followed this journey through the tafsīr will have seen that wherever ṣabr is mentioned, wherever success is mentioned, wherever glad tidings are mentioned, the people described are always praying; they always establish the prayer.

Do not trifle with your prayers. Make a firm commitment in this Ramadan — now, in fact: “whatever prayers I have missed — leaving the future aside, those I have already missed — I am going to make up.” Al-ḥamdu li-llāh, there is the account of a man who had about seven years of prayers to make up from earlier times, and who has nearly finished them. That is a great hope; it gives great hope to the many who have a large number of missed prayers.

The fourth thing they do is to spend of that which We have provided them. Let us, then, spend in the path of Allah, establish our prayers, be patient when the need arises, and cultivate such love for and connection with Allah that our hearts always stir with emotion whenever He is mentioned in any way.