Ashura: A Day for Changing What We Believe
If Ashura had to be captured in a single phrase, it would be this: the day of changing concepts. It is, at its core, a day of belief, and no act of worship on it makes sense unless something inside us actually shifts.
Every year the tenth of Muharram arrives, and most of us know the basic facts. A prophet was saved. A tyrant was drowned. We fast. We give thanks. But the fast was never meant to be a mechanical pause in eating. It was designed to produce a transformation in how we think, about who belongs to us, about who we are allowed to imitate, and about what excuses we are permitted to give when we are asked to do wrong.
Those are not small questions. And Ashura, understood properly, is one of the most direct answers the Islamic calendar offers.
Borders are made of dust, faith is not
When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah and found the Jewish community fasting on Ashura, he asked why. He was told: this is the day Allah saved Moses and drowned Pharaoh, so Moses fasted in gratitude. The Prophet ﷺ responded with a sentence that reshapes everything: "We have more right to Moses than you do."
There was no genealogical claim here. No shared homeland. What the Prophet ﷺ was asserting, plainly and finally, is that the bond of faith crosses time and space in a way that blood and geography simply cannot. We are heirs to Moses not because of where he was born or what passport he would have carried, but because the religion he carried is the same religion we carry.
Moses was not Egyptian. Pharaoh was. And yet on Ashura, we fast, not to mourn one or celebrate the other based on nationality, but to give thanks that faith prevailed over power.
The Quran reminds us that the prophets are brothers from the same father: one creed, different laws. Their shared identity was not ethnicity. It was submission to the One. So when we say we are heirs to Moses and Jesus and Abraham, we are saying something radical: the Muslim in Indonesia is closer to us than the non-Muslim next door. Nationality is an administrative fact. Faith is an ontological one.
This does not mean borders have no practical function. They organize movement, trade, and governance, and that is legitimate. But the moment national identity starts to determine who we love, who we protect, who we mourn, and who we consider "ours", we have handed the categories of the heart to something that was never meant to hold them.
The first thing to walk away with from Ashura: the question is never "Egyptian or not." The question is always "Muslim or not", and even then, the rights of every human being before us are set by revelation, not by sentiment.
Resemblance shapes the heart, whether we notice or not
The Prophet ﷺ did not simply fast on Ashura. Near the end of his life, when the companions noted that Jews and Christians also honored the day, he said: "If I am still alive next year, I will fast the ninth as well", to distinguish the Muslim observance from theirs.
This is not a minor detail of jurisprudence. It reflects a deeper principle: the heart is influenced by what the body does and what it resembles. Outward conformity to a group tends, quietly and over time, to generate inward affinity with that group. The opposite is also true.
Ibn Taymiyya observed something striking: he noted that certain recommended acts might be worth leaving, in some contexts, for the sake of drawing people's hearts closer, because even a voluntary practice can become a wall when it is wielded like a weapon. He wrote that it may sometimes be praiseworthy to leave what is praiseworthy, for the sake of hearts.
There is wisdom in that, and there is a parallel failure on the other end: those who, out of eagerness to feel distinct, become harsh, dismissive, and unkind, believing that severity is what closeness to God looks like. It is not. The Prophet ﷺ came with the hanifiyya al-samha, the spacious, generous path. The middle is not a compromise. It is the exact location of the Sunnah.
There is no such thing as "just following orders"
The Quran names them together: Pharaoh, Haman, and their armies. "Pharaoh, Haman, and their troops were sinners." Not Pharaoh alone. The soldiers who carried out his commands share in the account.
This matters enormously. One of the most persistent evasions in human history, across households, workplaces, and political systems, is the belief that obedience to a superior transfers moral responsibility upward. "I was told to." "I had no choice." "That's above my pay grade." Ashura answers each of those claims with the story of a sea closing over an army.
The person in the cubicle who falsifies the report because the manager asked. The employee who deceives the customer because the quota demands it. The child who dishonors a parent's enemy because the family expects it. None of them can point upward and say the sin traveled that way too. We are individually accountable for what our hands do, regardless of who instructed them.
If you are commanded to do something forbidden, you do not do it. That answer does not require a fatwa. It only requires knowing the difference between obedience that is owed and obedience that is borrowed.
This is not a call to recklessness. Wisdom matters in how we resist. There are gradations: what we must refuse outright, what we can delay, what we can change quietly, what requires patient strategy. The goal is not confrontation for its own sake. It is accountability for its own sake. A young man who dismantles his father's television habit by repeatedly pulling the fuse, patiently and quietly, until his father simply stops turning it on, has understood something important about changing what is wrong without breaking what is dear.
Three ideas worth carrying out of the fast
Borders are dust
The primary bond between us is belief. Geography and nationality are real, but they do not determine who we grieve for or stand beside.
Resemblance has consequence
What we imitate, we gradually become. The outer life shapes the inner one, which means we choose carefully what we mirror and why.
No one carries your account
Obedience to authority has limits the Quran names plainly. When the command is wrong, the soldier who follows it does not escape the reckoning.
How to observe Ashura
Scholars have also noted that spending generously on one's family on this day carries its own significance, a practice transmitted from the early generations and endorsed by Imam Ahmad, among others. And Ashura has long been considered an especially fitting time for sincere repentance.
None of this is ceremonial decoration. Each practice is tethered to a meaning: gratitude for deliverance, solidarity across time, the renewal of a covenant that does not depend on what country we were born in.
May this Ashura leave something changed in how we see the people around us, in how honestly we answer to the commands we receive, and in how closely our outer lives reflect the inner ones we are still becoming.
The Naseeha Mental Health Team