It’s Ramadan, and my feed is full of the usual infographics. You know the ones. “Did you know that praying in congregation gives you 27x the reward?” or “One night of the Night of Decree is worth more than 1,000 months of worship!” And every year I see them and go, yeah cool, that’s amazing. Move on.
And it’s been on my mind for ages now. Because at some point I started actually doing the math. And the math… doesn’t make sense.
Take the breaking-fast thing. There’s a hadith (Tirmidhi 807, graded as reliably authentic) that says if you provide food for someone who’s fasting to break their fast, you get the same reward as that person, without their reward being reduced at all. Sounds beautiful, right? But hold on. If I feed 30 people throughout Ramadan, I technically just earned 30 Ramadans worth of fasting reward. In one month. Without fasting myself. And then the person I fed also keeps their full reward. So where did all this extra reward come from? Did the reward economy just inflate?
Or the Night of Decree. One night, better than 1,000 months. That’s over 83 years. Most people don’t even live that long. So you’re telling me one good night of worship in my 20s could outweigh a literal lifetime of worship? The numbers are wild.
Praying in congregation, 27 times the reward of praying alone. So five daily prayers in congregation = 135 prayers worth of reward per day. In a week that’s almost 1,000 prayers. In a month, nearly 4,000. The math keeps scaling in ways that feel… off.
Or my personal favorite: the two units of voluntary prayer before dawn are “better than this world and all it contains” (Sahih Muslim 725). Two quick units. Better than the entire world. Everything in it. All the money, all the land, all of it. For something that takes maybe three minutes. How do you even begin to make that math work?
None of it adds up. And I’ve been sitting with that for ages. Not in a doubting way, more like, okay, so it must not be about the math at all. And maybe that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. The Quran keeps asking us “will you not think?” over and over again, dozens of times. Maybe the numbers being impossible is Allah’s way of making you stop and think about what the real point is.
Here’s what I think. I think they’re carrots.
Like, genuinely. Of course Allah knows full well how humans work. We’re simple creatures. We respond to incentives. Tell someone “do good because it’s good” and sure, some people will. But tell someone “do good and you’ll get 27x the reward,” and suddenly everyone’s showing up to the mosque. Tell someone “this one night is worth 83 years” and suddenly people are staying up all night in the last ten days of Ramadan praying with everything they got.
The carrots work. They get people moving.
But I don’t think the carrots are the point.
Because if the point was really just about collecting rewards, then Islam would basically be a loyalty program. Pray here, get points there, redeem at the door of paradise. And that feels… too small for what this is supposed to be.
I think it’s about the relationship. Like, the actual relationship with Allah. The closeness you build along the way. The rewards are just the thing that gets you in the door. But once you’re in, you realize the door was never the point.
I know this because I’ve felt it. There are nights where I’m just talking to Allah like a person. Not the formal prayer, not the memorized Arabic. Just… talking. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m scared of this. Please help me with that.” Raw, unfiltered, sometimes embarrassing stuff. And I don’t do it because there’s a hadith that says “talking to Allah at 3am gives you 50x the reward.” I do it because it feels like someone’s actually listening. And that feeling, you can’t put a multiplier on that.
Or charity. I’ve given money to people and the feeling afterward wasn’t “nice, reward secured.” It was something quieter. Like a warmth that had nothing to do with me. The satisfaction of realizing that it doesn’t always have to be about yourself, that giving something away can feel more complete than keeping it ever did. No spreadsheet, no calculation. Just the act itself filling something in you that you didn’t know was empty.
Or gratitude. I used to think being grateful was just saying “alhamdulillah” and meaning it. But at some point I realized it’s not a word, it’s an act. Like, you have money and food and health and time, and you’re just… sitting in all of that abundance without doing anything with it? That doesn’t feel like gratitude. Gratitude is when you take what you were given and actually use it. You got money, so you feed someone. You got health, so you fast. You got time, so you pray. That’s what thankfulness looks like when it stops being a sentence and starts being something you do.
That’s the stuff the carrots lead you to. And all of it brings you closer. That closeness, that’s the real thing. The rewards were never the currency. They were just the door.
And honestly, I think that’s kind of merciful? Like, Allah could’ve just said “do it because I said so” and left it at that. Obligatory, done, no explanation needed. But instead there’s this whole system of encouragement, these massive numbers designed to get you off the couch and into the mosque, to get your hands feeding people, to get your tongue reading at 4am. And somewhere along the way, between chasing the carrot and showing up day after day, the relationship deepens. The fasting strips you down, the prayer makes you still, and you start caring about people you wouldn’t have thought twice about before. You came for the points, but you stayed because you found something the points could never buy.
I don’t know if that’s the “correct” theological reading. I’m not a scholar. But it’s what makes sense to me right now.
Maybe it was never supposed to add up. Maybe the math being impossible is the whole point, because you can’t put a number on closeness to Allah.