Where every action really begins

There's a line you've probably heard if you've spent any time going to madrasah as a child, and it's deceptively short:

"Actions are nothing by intentions, and every person will have only what they intended."

That's an excerpt of the opening hadith of one of the most famous collections in Islam. Scholars have spent centuries unpacking it, and people wrote whole books around those few words. But you don't need a book to feel the weight of it; you just need to think honestly about your own day.

The part nobody sees

Most of what makes an action "good" is visible. You showed up, you helped, you finished the project. People can see the output, and so can you.

But niyyah (intention) is the part nobody sees, as it lives entirely in your chest. Two people can do the exact same thing, write the same email, give the same amount of money, show up to the same gathering, and the meaning of it, the actual weight of it, can be completely different depending on why they did it.

That's a strange idea if you're used to thinking about productivity. We measure outcomes and we track what got done; Islam points at something underneath all that, the silent engine that put the whole thing in motion.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Here's the part I find genuinely freeing.

If actions are weighed by intention, then the most ordinary parts of your day are available to you. Cooking a meal for your family, answering a message with kindness when you'd rather not, doing honest work even when no one's checking, etc. None of these look like worship, but Islam says that a sincere intention can turn them into exactly that.

The Prophet ﷺ put it in a way that's hard to forget. He told the sahabah that whatever you spend seeking the pleasure of Allah, you're rewarded for it, even the morsel of food you put in your spouse's mouth. A mouthful of food. That's about as ordinary as life gets, and yet the intention behind it is enough to give it weight. The act stays ordinary, the intention is what lifts it.

For anyone building something - a business, a habit, a personal project on Github - this is worth sitting with. So much of that life is unglamorous and unseen… the late nights, the small decisions, the work that no audience will ever clap for. Intention is what keeps that work from being “just work”.

The honest difficulty

I don't want to make this sound easy, because it isn't.

Intentions drift. You can start something for the right reason and, halfway through, you notice you're really doing it to be seen. You can tell yourself a pure story about why you're doing something, but deep down you know it isn't the whole truth. Anyone who's tried to do good work in public knows this tension well.

Islam doesn't ask you to be perfect here, it asks you to be aware, and to keep gently turning the wheel back toward ikhlas (sincerity), again and again, knowing you'll drift again.

A small way to start

You don't need a complicated system for this, but one small habit helps: before you start something (anything, honestly), pause for a second and ask yourself “Why am I doing this?” Not to produce some perfect answer, but just to notice.

That half-second of noticing is the whole thing. It's the difference between moving through your day on autopilot and moving through it fully awake.

The smallest and quietest part of any action turns out to be the part that decides everything. Worth paying attention to.

BarakAllah feekum.