Gratitude for the Emptiness • Vol 6

Jumada al-Thani • Shukr

My children and I have a daily practice; we do our morning adkhar, then we thank Allah for as many random things we can think of. Shoelaces, a mixed water tap, windows that are double glazed. This practice has honestly enriched my life. 

I admitted last month that patience is not my strong suit. Shukr comes easier. But, whilst being appreciative is a character trait I hold on to, this month I had to address the List. 

Its not easy to admit that I keep a mental list of the things I'm waiting on. The door that hasn't opened. The reply that hasn't come. The version of my life that's always just over the next hill. I could recite that list to you right now, in order, without pausing.

Being grateful for what you already have is, well - great! But for me, the struggle lay in consolidating the gap between what I have now, and what I pray for. And finding shukr within my sabr. Not just for what is yet to come, but for what will never come. For the empty spaces  

The Harvest After The Wait

Shukr is the sixth bend in our road, and it was never going to be anywhere else but here - directly after Sabr.

Last month we sat in the long, dry wait. We learned to stay rooted when nothing was happening, to hand the when back to the One who holds it. And the thing about a wait, any wait, is that it eventually ends. The answer comes. The rain finally falls on the dry ground. And when it does, there's a question waiting for you on the other side that's just as important as the patience was: will you notice?

Because here's what I've learned the hard way - the person who spends the whole wait aching for the gift often doesn't recognise it when it finally arrives. They've already moved their eyes to the next thing they're missing. The waiting and the thanking are two halves of the same skill. Sabr is staying rooted through the drought; shukr is turning your face up when the rain comes, and actually feeling the rain hit your skin, absorb into your clothing, to see the light glistening as it reflects off the wet pavement. The scholars said it plainly: faith is two halves, half patience and half gratitude. Last month was the first wing. This is the second. No bird flies on one.

The Strange Mercy I Kept Circling

There's an idea in this volume I couldn't stop turning over, and it reframed the whole month for me.

We think gratitude is a response - something that happens to us when something good arrives, the warmth that shows up on the good day. But the more I sat with it, the more I saw that shukr isn't a feeling that merely visits. It's a lens you place, deliberately, over a life you already have.

And that changes everything, because it means gratitude doesn't actually require your circumstances to improve. Nothing new has to arrive. Two people can live the identical ordinary day - same weather, same work, same small frustrations - and one ends it depleted and one ends it full. The only thing that separates them is where they chose to look. Gratitude is not the reward for a good life. It is the thing that reveals the life you already have as good. I find that almost unreasonably hopeful. It means the fullness I keep waiting for isn't out ahead of me, locked behind the door that won't open. It's here. I've just been looking past it.

On Counting What Never Happened

If I had to pick the single idea from this issue that undid me most, it's this one - and it comes from Ibn al-Qayyim, who sits at the heart of this volume’s centre feature.

We count our blessings as the things that arrived. The gifts, the answered du'as, the parcels delivered. But he points out that most of our blessings are things we'll never see at all - because they are absences. This month, we see Allah not only as al-Mu’ti - The Giver, but we see Him also as al-Mani’ - the Witholder. 

I think about that a lot now. How much of my life is quietly held together by rescues I never noticed, because the whole point of them is that nothing happened.

But this month, I didn’t just look at the ‘rescues’, as I sat with my thoughts, as I traced my blessings, back to the sender, I stumbled across something I didn’t expect to find. The empty spaces. The rejections. Not just what was held back from me, but what was never meant to be mine in the first place. 
Gratitude - not just acceptance - for the empty spaces.

Why Gratitude Has to Move

One last thing surprised me, and it's the reason the volume doesn't end on the page.

It’s easy to frame gratitude as something that only takes place inside - a warm, private feeling in the chest. But that's not where the Qur'an leaves it. The opposite of shukr, it turns out, isn't sadness. It's kufr - the same root as disbelief - and its core meaning is to cover, to bury a thing out of sight. The ungrateful one buries the gift. And so the grateful one does the reverse: she uncovers it. Holds it up to the light. Lets other people warm themselves at it.

Volume 6 guides you to recognition and implementation of true Shukr. Shukr reflected in three facets of life. The absence of one leaving your gratitude incomplete. 

So, This Month

If Sabr asked you to wait well, Shukr asks you to see well - and then to let what you see spill out of you, onto your tongue and into your hands.

We start absurdly small, with a naming. Then, we trace it back to the One who sent it. Once the return is rooted, we water it - we take shukr to our families, our environments, our outer worlds. And finally, we cultivate lasting change. 

You were never as empty-handed as the whisper told you. You just needed to turn the lens.

Shukr. The harvest of everything patience planted.

May Allah make us of the grateful - the ones who see His hand in the ordinary day, who thank Him for the mercies they can count and the harms they'll never know He turned away. And may He let us fly home on both wings.

You are not behind. You are in abundance. 

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Bismillah. Let us begin, together.

— Masuma Abdul-Muhit