Surat Al-’Asr, 103:1–3
We read Asr salah according to the lengths of our shadows. It’s between noon and sunset, and it’s both the last prayer of the day when you note that the day starts at Maghrib, and also the one that marks the start of the evening. In this surah, it’s been translated as time, but also as the start of the declining day. I guess I’m describing all of this because it consistently feels as though we are remembering time in order to remember that life is always coming to an end.
When we look at how we organise our own time, it seems appropriate that Asr marks the change into the evening because it marks a shift in behaviour. For many, it’s when work ends and for many, it’s when work starts but it generally marks a change between time devoted to living in the dunya and time more freely managed. Again, it’s pressing to make us remember that time is limited when life is always coming to an end. It calls on us to remember purpose.
In the next ayah, we’re told that we’re in a state of loss. It’s an observation made externally and omnisciently but there’s no specific subject of that loss. What are we losing? The more I look into the figurative weight of it, the more I realise it’s an extremely comprehensive surah and its brevity drives it home even further. We’re really losing everything. This is regression. It’s a recognition that we’ve been blessed by so much to begin with. We’ve not all been given the same blessings but there’s a huge amount we can all be grateful for. The issue is that we aren’t grateful. As a species, we don’t embrace these blessings, and in so doing, we also don’t keep them all. We gradually lose everything we have until we are justly left only with hell. It seems extreme but at the same time, it’s simply an observation, but crucially an observation of some, and there is an exception.
We’ve been blessed further by this exception. That third ayah tells us how we avoid this loss. It tells us what we can do not to regress but rather in fact to progress, to recognise our blessings and to use this limited time to gain from the blessings we have been given. When Imam Shafi says that this surah alone could have been all the guidance we need, it’s this third ayah that guides us with such simplicity that it’s difficult to believe these four tenets are all we need to stay away from such a drastic and meaningful loss as that which leads us to nothing but hellfire and all that shaitan desires of us.
Faith, righteous deeds, knowledge and patience. Faith is easy enough but it’s shaitan’s end goal to have us lose faith. There’s so much temptation on the way before we get there. Righteous deeds easily exist among bad ones. We have to put work in there. Knowledge is easily accessible too but it also needs work and the same goes for patience. Not one of these things is beyond reach and yet it’s still easy for time to have passed without us having done anything about that loss.
The length of the surah and the way it reads then exemplifies everything it asks us for. Do we read it with patience? It’s cadence requires that we stop along the way. Do we understand what it demands of us? Because too often, it’s the surah that’s read to make sure salah ends quickly. Do we take the time to reflect upon who we are and take stock of the limited time we have or do we use the surah to allow us to keep committing as much of our time to heads that are lost in the dunya? This is a surah that asks us to be good and calls on us to question our intentions but at the same time, it’s the very surah used most often with bad intentions. It’s testament to the need to learn but it’s also testament to the need to devote ourselves to conscientious time.
