🌊 Gathering Your Shataat: The Spiritual & Practical Cure

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February 6th, 2026   |   Read Online 18th Sha'ban 1447H On Monday, I shared what shataat (scattered focus) is and why it's not just a personal problem but an Ummah crisis. Today, let's talk about the cure. There's a hadith of the Prophet ﷺ that gives us both the root cause and solution for shataat: "Whoever makes this world their primary concern, Allah will scatter their affairs, place poverty before their eyes, and they will receive nothing of this world except what was already written for them. But whoever makes the Hereafter their intention, Allah will gather their affairs, place richness in their heart, and the world will come to them willingly." (Sunan Ibn Majah) The root cause of shataat? Making this world our primary concern and the Hereafter a secondary or tertiary concern. The root solution? The inverse, making the Hereafter our main concern. Most of us struggling with shataat have lost our central spiritual gravity. Without the anchor of worshipping Allah and preparing for the Hereafter, we're floating in this dunya, scattered in a purposeless zero-gravity, bouncing in a hundred different directions without solid footing. If we want to address the root cause of shataat, we need to gather all our energy and time, and laser-focus them around one question: How can I please Allah and make it to Jannah? When that question becomes your organizing principle from the moment you wake up until you sleep, your heart will find its spiritual center, and Allah will gather your matters for you. Gathering the Three Levels In my previous email, I mentioned that we have shataat across three levels: our spiritual hearts (shataat al-qalb), our minds (shataat al-'aql), and our nafs (shataat al-nafs). Here's how to gather each one, keeping the above central question in mind: To gather your heart: Focus on Allah. Be in a state of dhikr. Make your salah the anchor of your day. When you consciously gather your heart towards worshipping Allah, everything else begins to align. To gather your nafs: Stop letting it chase every desire. Say 'no' to your nafs every now and then, even for permissible things. Practice fasting often (not just in Ramadan), eat less, talk less, and yes delete apps that your nafs wants to scroll through endlessly. The nafs, when left unchecked, will scatter you in a thousand directions. To gather your mind: Build systems so your brain isn't burdened with storing information. Use calendars for appointments, task managers for your to-dos, notes for your ideas and thoughts. Let tools carry the weight of remembering so your mind is free to think deeply, create meaningful work, and solve personal and community problems. And guard it from that which doesn't concern you. How You Start Your Day Determines Your Shataat Level Yesterday, I made the fatal mistake of checking my phone just before Fajr prayer. What started as "let me check WhatsApp to make sure I didn't miss anything important" led me down a rabbit hole of reacting and responding to messages, notifications, and losing my 'Fajr calm' before even reaching the masjid. This morning, I was more intentional. I 'bricked' my phone the night before and made sure I wouldn't check it until after I completed my writing session in the morning. What a difference. I was more calm, focused, spiritually grounded and had one of the best writing sessions in a long time. "But what if I had a bad start to the day? Is my day over?" Not quite. Yesterday, after my disastrous morning start, I made an intention to 'reset' myself and not let the hijacking of my brain continue post-Fajr. I calmly recited the morning athkar and did lots of dhikr, asking Allah to gather my shataat, and eventually I was back on track, alhamdulillah. This is HAARD! I'm sharing the above story to let you know that even someone like me, who spent years teaching and practicing productivity, struggles with the onslaught of distractions. In fact, most people know what they should do to tackle shataat, but don't do it. We know we should put our phone away. We know we should be more intentional on how we spend our time. We know we should block time for deep focused work. But when you're alone, fighting your nafs, surrounded by notifications and temptations... it's hard. Really hard. But we weren't designed to struggle alone. There's a reason our deen emphasizes jama'ah. There's a reason the Prophet ﷺ said the wolf eats the lone sheep.  This is why we started building something to help Muslim professionals fight shataat together. And I'm excited to finally share it with you. Introducing BarakahFlow™️: Virtual Coworking for Muslim Professionals BarakahFlow: Virtual Coworking for Muslim Professionals Worldwide BarakahFlow™️ is a virtual coworking space where Muslim professionals from around the world gather daily to focus on their most important work.  Every session follows a simple but powerful structure: We begin with a conscious bismillah. A trained BarakahFlow™️ facilitator leads the group, grounding everyone spiritually with a conscious bismillah. We set sincere intentions. Each person briefly shares what they're working on and why. This transforms even mundane tasks into potential worship.  We enter deep focus. We work through two 45-minute blocks of distraction-free work. Cameras on. Mics off. Phones away. There's something powerful about knowing other Muslims are focusing alongside you. We reflect and celebrate Barakah. At the end, we share what we accomplished, support each other, and close with Shukr. Members often share "Barakah moments", those unexpected breakthroughs, that clarity that came from nowhere, the task that took half the time it usually does. When and Where? We run sessions Monday through Friday, three times daily across different times: You join whichever session fits your schedule. Some members attend daily. Others join 2-3 times a week. The key is consistency. What Can You Work On? Anything meaningful. Our members use BarakahFlow™️for: Quran memorization and recitation Professional projects and deadlines Creative work (writing, design, content) Islamic studies and learning House chores that keep getting postponed Business building and side projects The task doesn't matter as much as the intention behind it. Here's what some of our members have shared: "I was in a constant battle with time. But now. just by showing up with presence and intention, time takes care of itself." — Moriam Uddin, BarakahFlow Member "I always used to rush to my tasks, and these sessions helped me stay grounded and pushed me to focus on intentions, having the gardener mindset, and attracting Barakah by making dua." — Aiman Hafeez, Community Builder "I know that every morning, inshaAllah, I have a place to go where I can focus on my work." — Khadija Athman, HR Consultant What's Included? When you join BarakahFlow™️, you get: Three daily focus sessions (Monday-Friday) across time zones Two 45-minute blocks per session with trained BarakahFlow™️facilitators Saturday weekly review and intentions session to plan your upcoming week Monthly review sessions to stay aligned with your bigger intentions Full community access to connect with like-hearted Muslim professionals  —> Try BarakahFlow™️ Free for One Month I believe in this enough that I want you to experience it before you commit to it. Your first month is completely free. Just join, show up to the sessions, and see how it feels to focus with Barakah. But whether you join BarakahFlow™️ or not, please take shataat seriously. This is a spiritual disease that's scattering us - as individuals and as an Ummah - at a time when we desperately need to be gathered. The Prophet ﷺ gave us the cure: make the Hereafter your primary concern, and Allah will gather your affairs for you. Start there. Everything else follows insha'Allah. Sincerely, Mohammed Faris Founder, The Productive Muslim Company mohammed@productivemuslim.com ProductiveMuslim.com   Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here © 2026 The Productive Muslim Company 3824 Cedar Springs Rd #801-8634 Dallas, Texas 75219, United States Powered by beehiiv Terms of Service

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Contesting the Zaydi Political Tradition in Early Modern Yemen: an Edition of Imam Yaḥyā Sharaf al-Dīn's Will of 18 Ramadan 933/27 June 1527" (Shii Studies Review), Ekaterina Pukhovaia (Utrecht Univers… Read on blog or Reader Islamic Law Blog Read on blog or Reader Weekend Scholarship Roundup February 6, 2026 SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Contesting the Zaydi Political Tradition in Early Modern Yemen: an Edition of Imam Yaḥyā Sharaf al-Dīn's Will of 18 Ramadan 933/27 June 1527" (Shii Studies Review), Ekaterina Pukhovaia (Utrecht University) presents "a unique manuscript housed in the Imam Zayd b. ʿAlī Cultural Foundation [that] preserves the earliest known copy of a will (waṣiyya) of Imam al-Mutawakkil Yaḥyā Sharaf al-Dīn (d. 965/1557), the Zaydi imam, who ruled Yemen on the eve of the Ottoman conquest of South Arabia. The will provides unique insight into the practice of Zaydi governance and the attempts by Zaydi elites to circumvent the constraints of Zaydi political theory, particularly its rejection of dynastic succession. The article presents an analytical introduction to the document and provides an edition of the Arabic text." Miranda Melcher (Kings College London) interviews Gina Vale (University of Southamptom) about The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press), which "explores the governance of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization through the lives and words of local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women" and argues that "the presence, exclusion, and victimization of local civilian women were necessary to the functioning and legitimation of IS's 'caliphate' project, and the supremacy of affiliated men - and women." On Islam and AI/Data Science In "Digital Eschatology in Islamicate Traditions: a Comparative Study of Inter-Religious Prophecies" (Journal of Digital Islamicate Studies), Mohammed Qasim Khan (University of Malaya Wilayah Persekutuan) "explores the emerging phenomenon of digital eschatology within Islamicate traditions by examining how artificial intelligence and digital platforms influence inter-religious apocalyptic narratives. Situating the research within the broader context of digital religion and Islamicate digital humanities, [the article] focuses on the doctrinal, popular, and speculative representations of eschatological content generated or mediated through AI technologies." [login required] In "Rezwan: Leveraging Large Language Models for Comprehensive Hadith Text Processing: A 1.2M Corpus Development" (arXiv), Majid Asgari-Bidhendi (Iran University of Science and Technology) and others present "the development of Rezwan, a large-scale AI-assisted Hadith corpus comprising over 1.2M narrations, extracted and structured through a fully automated pipeline.... rigorous evaluation was conducted on 1,213 randomly sampled narrations, assessed by six domain experts. Results show near-human accuracy in structured tasks such as chain–text separation (9.33/10) and summarization (9.33/10), while highlighting ongoing challenges in diacritization and semantic similarity detection....The work introduces a new paradigm in religious text processing by showing how AI can augment human expertise, enabling large-scale, multilingual, and semantically enriched access to Islamic heritage." FIELD GUIDE TO ISLAMIC LAW ONLINE: RECENT SOURCES The Field Guide to Islamic Law Online is an ever-growing collection of links to hundreds of primary sources and archival collections around the world, online. We recently added a new resource to this list: "The Rezwan Corpus is the most comprehensive intelligent database of Shia and Sunni hadith, containing over 1.39 million narrations from 1,289 historical books. Developed by the Najm Institute, this dataset is enriched with AI-driven annotations to transform raw text into usable knowledge for researchers, academics, and developers in Natural Language Processing and Islamic Studies. This corpus was created to solve the traditional challenges of hadith research: the vast volume of sources, the difficulty of analyzing chains of transmission, and the lack of unified, searchable access. Rezwan provides a structured, accessible, and powerful resource for deep analysis, comparative studies, and the development of AI applications." UPCOMING EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES PIL & Harvard Events:  Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Chris Rominger, "Sea Changes: Trans-Mediterranean Lives and Networks at the Turn of the 20th Century," February 9, 2026 @ 6:15pm Islamic Law Speaker Series: Sohaira Siddiqui (Georgetown University), "Islamic Law on Trial: Contesting Colonial Power in British India," February 10, 2026 @ 12:30pm Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Giovanni DiRusso, "The Textual Tradition of the Arabic Apocalypse of Peter: Variance and Adaptation in a Christian Arabic Apocalypse," February 23, 2026 @ 7:15pm Islamic Law Speaker Series: Ihsan Yilmaz (Deakin University), "Sharia as Informal Law: Lived Experiences of Young Muslims in Western Societies," March 10, 2026 @ 12:30pm Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Cem Turkoz, "An Edifice of Super-Glosses: The Making of an Ottoman Tradition of Natural Philosophy, 1650–1800," March 23, 2026 @ 6:15pm Islamic Law Speaker Series: Sherman Jackson (University of Southern California), "The Islamic Secular," April 7, 2026 @ 12:30pm Workshop: Arabic TEI (Textual Encoding Initiative), April 2–3, 2026 Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Amadu Kunateh, "Footnote to Ghazali: Philosophy Without Falsafa in West African Intellectual Archive," April 6, 2026 @ 6:15pm Workshop: Middle East Beyond Borders—Djelemory Diabate, "Closing the Sufi Age: Authority, Finality, and Political Theology in Umar al-Futi Tal's Kitab Rimah," April 20, 2026 @ 6:15pm PIL & Harvard Opportunities:  Call for Applications: 2026–2027 PIL Research Fellowship, February 13, 2026 Global Events:  Conference: Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, Amherst, MA, March 19–21, 2026 Conference: Humanities of AI—Intelligence and Imitation: Mind, Mechanism, Mimesis, Johns Hopkins University, April 24–26, 2026 Conference: American Society for Premodern Asia Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, April 24–27, 2026 Conference: Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT), University of Chicago, May 1–2, 2026 Workshop: The Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, June 8–9, 2026 Conference: Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, Chicago, June 17–18, 2026 Conference: Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November 21–24, 2026 Global Opportunities:  Call for Panels: Middle East Medievalists at MESA 2026, February 12, 2026 Call for Papers: Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, February 17, 2026 Call for Applications: Kamel Center Senior Postgraduate Fellowship, Yale Law School, February 20, 2026 Call for Papers: Comparative Law Work-in-Progress Workshop, Princeton University, February 20, 2026 Call for Proposals: UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies Graduate Student Colloquium: The Visual Culture of Algeria Through Exchange, Circulation, and Global Networks, February 27, 2026 Call for Applications: Orient-Institut Beirut Residential Postdoctoral Fellowship, March 1, 2026 Call for Papers: Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Program, American Society for Legal History, April 1, 2026 Call for Participation: Digital Medieval Studies Institute, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 13, 2026 Position Opening: Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East, Colby College, July 1, 2026  Call for Participation: Digital Medieval Studies Institute, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK, July 10, 2026 Comment

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