Safar • Yaqin
Here is something strange, and a little sad. For a long time, this month, Safar, was a month people were afraid of.
The Arabs believed it was unlucky, that it carried misfortune in its very bones. So they braced against it. They delayed marriages, put off journeys, held their breath through it, as though the month itself could reach out and harm them. Imagine that: living one twelfth of every year flinching, certain the days themselves were against you.
And if we are honest, many of us still do a version of this. There is often a season that once held something painful for us, and now, every year, when the leaves turn or the roads grow icy or the wind picks up, wherever in the calendar it happens to fall, we find ourselves quietly bracing, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But this is exactly what Islam came to free us from. With a single sentence, the Prophet ﷺ lifted the fear: there is no Safar. No bad luck in a month. No omen in the days. No power in the unseen except His. And notice what he set in its place. Not a different superstition, not a charm to ward off harm. He gave tawakkul, trust, and he gave the good word, the hopeful expectation. He loved optimism, and disliked the gloomy bracing for the worst.
What certainty actually means
If we are honest, most of us are still a little afraid of Safar. Not the month, perhaps. But the unknown. The phone call that might come. The result we are waiting on. The future the mind insists on rehearsing in its very worst version, again and again, at three in the morning. We brace. We grip. We try to stay one step ahead of a tomorrow only Allah can see.
And yaqin, certainty, is not the cure you might expect. It is not a promise that nothing bad will ever happen; that was never offered to anyone. It is not certainty about what tomorrow holds. It is certainty about Who holds tomorrow. You were never asked to know the road. You were asked to know the One waiting at the end of it.
Musa and Yusuf, Tawakkul with Action
There is one moment that holds all of this. Musa (as) has led his people out of Egypt, the same deliverance remembered each year on Ashura. Behind them, the most powerful army on earth, Pharaoh and his men, the dust of their horses already on the horizon. And ahead of them, the sea. Just the sea. No boat, no bridge, no raft waiting on the shore. No plan any sensible person could see.
Trapped. The sea in front, the swords behind.
His people did exactly what we would do. They panicked. They cried out, inna lamudrakun - we are caught, we are overtaken, this is the end. You can hear the terror in it. Any one of us would have said the same.
And Musa (as) standing in the very same place, seeing the very same army and the very same impossible water, said something that should stop us in our tracks. Kalla. Inna ma'iya Rabbi sayahdin. - No. My Lord is with me. He will guide me.
Notice what he did not say. He did not say he had a plan. He did not say the sea was about to part, because he did not know that yet. He had no exit, no strategy, no map. What he had was a Who. My Lord is with me. That was the whole of his certainty. Not the how. The Who.
And then the command came, and this is the part most worth carrying. Allah did not simply open the sea for him. He told Musa: strike the sea with your staff. Do something. Take the means. Lift your hand and strike the water that everyone can see is just water. So he did. He took the small, almost absurd action that was his to take, a man striking an ocean with a stick, and then the sea split open into a road.
That is tawakkul. Tie your camel, strike the sea, take the one real action that is yours to take, and then hand the rest, the part that was never yours, back to Allah. The trembling is human. The striking is your effort. The parting of the sea was never your job to begin with.
Then there is Yusuf (as), who was faced with a choice: to accept the advances of the minister’s wife after she had locked the doors behind them, or to choose what was pleasing to Allah. He refused her and ran towards the door.
What is remarkable is that Yusuf (as) ran towards a door he knew was locked. He did not know how Allah would deliver him from this trial, but he knew what obedience required of him. He took the step that pleased Allah, trusting that Allah would make a way where there appeared to be none.
And what happened? The door was flung open. Yusuf was freed. Allah made a way for him.
Yaqin is not knowing how the door will open. Yaqin is running towards it anyway.
When the ground feels unsure
This is why, if you spend time with this issue, you will find it returning again and again to the small, steadying things the Sunnah hands a frightened heart. The word of sufficiency that Ibrahim (as) said as he was thrown into the fire, hasbunAllahu wa ni'mal wakil, Allah is enough for us, and the best to rely upon. The practice of expecting good of Allah rather than the worst, husn al-zann, deliberately choosing the kinder reading of a closed door. Naming the anxious whisper for what it is, and seeking refuge from it, instead of believing everything fear tells you.
These are not grand gestures. They are lamps you keep by the bed, so that when the dark comes, you are not scrambling in a panic to find the switch. The aim is to know where your hand will fall before the fear is at its loudest.
Why this comes after beginning again
There is a reason certainty follows the theme of starting over. The moment you set out, fear arrives. The instant you decide to change, to leave something behind, to walk toward Allah, the mind floods with every reason it might go wrong. So trust had to come next, because a journey you do not trust is one you abandon at the first hard mile. Beginning gets you moving. Certainty is what keeps you walking when the road turns dark and you cannot yet see where it bends.
So let this be where we leave it. You are not at the mercy of the unseen. You are not cursed, or doomed, or a worrier to your very core. You are a believer who feels fear and is learning, slowly, where to set it down.
You do not need to feel no fear. You need only one word to reach for, the moment the ground feels unsure. And you have it.
Yaqin. Certainty. Not in the road, but in the One waiting at the end of it.
May Allah loosen our grip on what was never ours to carry, trade our dread for trust one prayer at a time, and remind us, on the coldest of nights, that we are watched over by the One who never sleeps.
Bismillah. Let us begin, together.
- Masuma Abdul Muhit, Safar 1448
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