How to Pray Tahajjud in Ramadan So Your Duas Get Answered

The Heart Behind the Prayer

For most of us, for many of us, it is not that we don't pray salah on time or we don't pray salah often enough. It is not that we don't care about the night prayer. It is that deep down we do not have the same feelings towards Allah.

The feeling of love, the feeling of fear, the feeling of indebtedness, of shame, the feeling of gratitude — that doesn't exist in the heart. If the engine is not working, the plane will not fly. If a camel doesn't have food, it will not walk.

This is the nourishment of the heart. Those emotions — if those emotions are not there, the outer worship is going to be empty.

The Night Prayer of the Prophet ﷺ

One day, Bilal, who enters the house of the Prophet, before Fajr, before the morning prayer, and he finds him reciting the Qur'an in the night prayer. He finds that he's crying so much, it's like someone poured a bucket of water on his head. And after the salah, he asks him, "O Prophet of Allah, what led you to cry so much? I've never seen you sob this much before."

The Prophet says to him, "Do you know, Bilal, what Allah revealed to me tonight? Allah revealed to me verses from Surah Ali 'Imran."

"In the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the alternation of night and day, there are signs for people who think."

These verses, the Prophet did not race through them. He spent time with them. He contemplated them until they moved him to tears, until the tears took over his body. This moment is recorded until the end of time. It will be a timeless memory that it is not about how many pages you recited, but it is about how many tears you shed. It is not about how quickly you finished, but it is about how deeply the impact was felt of those verses.

One Ayah for an Entire Night

Aisha tells us: one night, the Prophet recited one ayah again and again and again and again — the entire night. Imagine now: night, Aisha comes in at eight, and imagine Fajr is at five, and imagine for eight hours — eight hours — he stood reciting one ayah.

I challenge you to try it for 20 minutes — you'll get bored. What kind of a person does he need to be to enjoy one ayah for eight hours? What does it take to taste the verses fresh again and again? And more interestingly, what was the verse that he was reciting?

"Oh Allah, if you punish them, they are your slaves — you can do so. But oh Allah, if you forgive them, then you are the Mighty and you are the Authority."

This ayah, he recited it again and again and again, all night. Why? Because of the impact it had.

Clearly for him, the night prayer was not about quantity, but it was about the quality. Clearly it was about the contemplation — it was not about the race to finish. And he tasted these verses, and he would make du'a between verses. When he would stop at a verse that described paradise, he would pause, he would say, "Oh Allah, make us of the people of paradise." And when he would recite a verse of hellfire, he would pause, and he would say, "Oh Allah, protect me from the hellfire."

The sign of a prophetic prayer is not how much you recited, but how much you stopped. It's not about how much you recited but how little you recited. It's not about how quick the rak'ah was, but how slow it was. It is not about the length of your thawb, but how far your tears dripped onto the carpet.

The Worship of the Heart

The greatest worship of the Prophet ﷺ was not his bodily worship. It was the worship of the heart. Whatever you saw outside, inside something far greater was happening.

Whatever on the outside you saw of his ruku' and his standing and his sujood — the level of gratitude to Allah in his heart far outstripped what you saw on the outside. The outside could not show you the depth of gratitude, the depth of shame he had from Allah, the depth of love of Allah, the depth of fear of Allah in his heart. You could never know how deep it was. You only got the tip of the iceberg on the outside of the Prophet.

And therefore, for most of us, for many of us, it is not that we don't pray salah on time or we don't pray salah often enough. It is not that we don't care about the night prayer. It is that deep down we do not have the same feelings towards Allah. The feeling of love, the feeling of fear, the feeling of indebtedness, of shame, the feeling of gratitude — that doesn't exist in the heart. If the engine is not working, the plane will not fly. If a camel doesn't have food, it will not walk. This is the nourishment of the heart. Those emotions — if those emotions are not there, the outer worship is going to be empty.

And this is what made the Prophet's worship greater than the worship of any man on this earth. He made the same movements. Arguably, some companions of the Prophet would go further than him. They would stand up for longer. They would fast more days. They would give more in charity — more quantity. But they could never match the depth of feeling in his heart.

And so if you want to compete, don't compete on quantity, but compete in depth and quality. This is what the Prophet ﷺ teaches us.

What moves you to worship is greater than the worship itself. The intention is greater than the action. What is in the heart is greater than what is on the limbs.

We've Missed the Big Picture of Salah

We miss the whole point of the Prophet's ﷺ sunnah. He says, "Pray as you have seen me pray." How do we interpret it? Did he put his hands here? Or here? Or here? Or here? Where did he put his hands? This is a part of salah. But we miss the core of salah.

When he said "pray as you have seen me pray," did you see him pray for six hours straight? Did you see his ruku'? Did you see his khushu'? Did you see his focus, his humility, his intensity, his weeping in sujood? Did you see his long du'a? Did you see his ruku' which was as long as his standing? Did you see him recite Surah al-Baqarah and Ali 'Imran and an-Nisa' in one prayer? Did you see that? That's the prayer we should be emulating. But we got lost in the detail, the finer detail, and we missed the big picture. Missed the big picture completely.

It's like somebody goes to buy a car and you go and you check the mirrors. And you open the bonnet and look inside. And you check whether the buttons are working to get the windows up and down. And you say, "Yes, I'm going to take the car." The car has no tires. How is it going to move? You missed the whole point. You got all the details and you missed the point. This is how we do with salah.

Yes, the outward prayer is important. But he never condemned a person's salah except when their inward salah was deficient. Somebody came to the masjid. He prayed salah. He did all the movements and he left. The Prophet said, "Stop. You didn't pray. Go back and pray." Three times. His outward salah was fine — it was perfect. What was he missing? The slowness of prayer. The peace of salah. It is as though he didn't pray.

This is the Prophet. He keeps pointing to this — guys, don't miss the point. It's not about the movements. Don't come and peck on the floor like a chicken. He described the salah of a hypocrite: the hypocrite waits until the end of time and then he quickly pecks four times on the ground like a chicken. And he goes — that's his salah. He says, "That is the salah of a fake believer." This is the description of our salah, many of us.

Building the Salah Habit Step by Step

If you want to get started emulating the salah of the Prophet, just the salah — for a month, my advice: don't pray any additional voluntary prayers. Start with the obligatory salah. Pray it early. Pray it on time. Take your time — 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Lunch break at work, maybe you get 30 minutes for lunch, 45 minutes for lunch — 10 minutes, 15 minutes salah. Make this the most important part of your day. Try doing this for a month, just focusing on the five daily prayers. No more, no less.

When you get to this level, then you add a new habit — the 12 Sunan. The Prophet ﷺ, in some narrations 12, some narrations 14 Sunan — sunnah voluntary prayers that he would pray every single day. In the Hanafi madhab, these are the Sunnah Mu'akkadah. Once you complete this, then the next level: the night prayer, the Duha prayer. But don't try to race to the end straight away. Build it like a building, like a foundation — one by one, one by one — until you get to a place where you can manage many things at once.

The Most Beloved Deeds to Allah

The Prophet ﷺ says in a famous hadith:

"The most beloved deeds to Allah are the most consistent, even if they are small." (Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 6464; Sahih Muslim, Hadith 783)

The Consistency of the Prophet ﷺ

One day, Alqamah, may Allah be pleased with him, asks Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, the Prophet's wife:

"O Mother of the Believers, what was the Prophet's deeds like — his actions, what did they look like? Did he have some days for special things, and other days for other special things?"

She said no. She says this famous word:

"His actions were consistent." (Sahih Muslim, Hadith 746)

He would do something — he would do it every day of his life. What does consistency mean? It means this action, this habit is so important in my life that if I miss it, I will compensate for it. I will make it up later. So if the Prophet ﷺ would miss his 12 sunnahs — he would pray every day, or 14 depending on which narration you take — he would make them up later. If he missed the night prayer, he would make it up in the daytime, because these are his habits. These are the pillars of his day. They never change. They never move. They never sway. This is consistency.

When you do something consistently, you start to realize — on a daily basis you won't see the effect, but there's a compound effect. Every mountain starts with a pebble. One pebble, another pebble — before you realize it, it's a mountain. The Prophet ﷺ — this is how his worship would be: small but consistent.

So when we want to copy, embody, emulate the Prophet ﷺ, we have to start with something small that we can do. We have to be realistic. The Prophet ﷺ says, when he's giving advice about this, "Take on board deeds that you are actually realistically able to do. Allah doesn't get bored, but you might get bored. Don't overdo it." So start with once a week. You can do once a week — make it twice. You can do twice — make it three times, four times. Hold yourself to account.

How to Build Consistent Habits

But how do we build consistent habits? This is a deeper question and it applies to all aspects of life. How do you build a consistent habit? There's a book I can recommend to all of you — there's two books. One is a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. He writes a brilliant book called Atomic Habits. It's all on this idea — how do I develop a habit? How do I make something from a deed once in a while? We've tried it. Ramadan — everybody has the habit of Quran. After Ramadan, it's gone. It evaporates.

The most effective way to build a habit is to create a sense of accountability. I'll give you a simple example. Everyone says, "I want to memorize the Quran." I say, great. Pay a teacher — not a friend, pay somebody an amount every week — and let it be someone who you are scared of. You don't want to disappoint them. You respect them. Make a fixed weekly time when you have to meet them, and give strict rules to yourself. Say, "Look, teacher, if I come 10 minutes late, cancel the lesson and make me still pay for it. If I miss four lessons in a row, never talk to me again. Tell me to get lost." Finish. Creating this accountability, consequences, punishment — if you miss your weekly time — creating this whole system will force you to turn up every week. Even if you are the laziest person in the world, you will turn up because you're scared of the consequences.

Creating Accountability for the Night Prayer

What about the night prayer? How can I create a system for the night prayer? One of the ways to do this is the power of jama'ah. Alone, there's very little you can accomplish. But when we do things in groups, we're able to accomplish much more.

You create a WhatsApp group — call it the Qiyam al-Layl crew, the A team, the Muzzammil team, whatever you want. Be creative. What's the deal of this group? All of us are going to choose one night in the week to pray Qiyam al-Layl, the night prayer. And if we all succeed in doing so, there is a reward — a group reward. We will each pay 20 pounds into this pot every month, and we will get a reward for all of us, or we'll go out for a meal, or we'll have some celebration or something. But we have one goal, one goal only:

We want to be the people — when everybody's asleep, we are standing. When everybody's laughing, we are crying. That we have this depth of connection to Allah. We are the people of the night prayer.

You create this group. You create this accountability. Everybody's asking the other. You make pairs. You say, "Look, Ahmed, at 3 a.m. you have to ring me. And if I don't wake up, there is a consequence — I have to give a hundred pounds in charity the next day." Ahmed rings you — you will be awake like there's no business.

This is the reason why — if I give you a real life example — this is the reason why many people will not wake up for Fajr, but one hour later they'll be up at 8 a.m. for work. Why? What's the difference? Allah and your boss. Why would we wake up for our boss but we're not waking up for Allah? Because there's accountability. If we don't wake up at 8 for our boss, we lose the paycheck. We lose our career. We lose our job. We're seen as unprofessional. Maybe they'll give us a slap on the wrist. Scared of the consequence — everybody's up at 8 a.m. Look at the rush hour traffic at 8 a.m. Look at the rush hour traffic at Fajr time. There's no rush hour because there's no accountability in this world.

Create some self-accountability. If you do not have the fear of Allah, the love of Allah — that engine to move you to pray at night — create a system that will force you. A friend, a partner, a teacher, a group. Something that will force you to worship Allah. Whether it's reading a page a day of the Quran. Whether it's praying the night prayer. Creating a system where somebody else is going to hold you to account — this is what will help you succeed.