Praying? Get your phone out!
INsights 074, Friday 25th April 2025

Below is an AI-assisted summary (5 minute reading time) of the full video above.

Last week I shared that I’d been enjoying my prayers a lot more than usual recently.

But I didn’t go into too much detail as to why.

So here goes...

Three things that I think have been really helping me, and could help you too:

1️⃣ achieving greater coherence between prayer and life
2️⃣ completely dropping my sense of time
3️⃣ using my phone to increase scriptural engagement

The value of coherence

When I think about coherence, I’m reminded of an analogy I use in Transform My Prayer about Formula One races. The pit stop in the race isn’t random; it fits within the context of the race. It’s purposeful. The driver pauses, resets, and the car is prepped to continue efficiently toward the end goal.

Salat is like that. It’s our pit stop in the race of life. But if our “race” - our life between the prayers - is going in a completely different direction to the thrust of the prayer, the pit stops begin to feel odd, disjointed, or even burdensome.

Imagine a driver who leaves the racetrack, drives on the grass for a while, then randomly pulls in for a pit stop. He's missed the overall point whilst still trying to participate in some strange way.

That’s incoherent, and I think that’s how many of us experience prayer when our daily lives are not aligned with the purpose of salat.

Both the prayer and life between prayers are supposed to be in remembrance and service of our Lord.

Over the years, I’ve noticed how much the quality of my salat is affected not just by what happens during the prayer, but by what’s happening between the prayers. After all, most of our day isn’t spent praying - we’re talking 23 hours out of 24.

So if that time is filled with distractions, aimlessness, or work that’s not consciously for God, prayer will always feel like a disruption rather than an essential and integrated part of the day.

So back to me for a moment.

As I wrote about straight after Ramadan, I’ve been feeling deeper momentum and clarity in life between the prayers: pursuing a greater sense of mission, trying to align everything I do with the cause of God.

That effort has been building over years - with many challenges and low points along the way no doubt - but recently it’s felt especially driven. I’ve seen firsthand how that alignment has helped transform my prayers.

When my actions and thoughts in daily life are sincerely for God - when I’m trying to live courageously, meaningfully, and intentionally - it makes salat feel like a powerful, natural part of the rhythm: a pause to reconnect, to praise, to ask for strength - and then it's back into meaningful striving.

It’s like a flywheel: the energy from one part powers the other.

So if you want to solve your prayer problem, I would really invite you to look deeply at your own life between the prayers.

How much of what you do, think, pursue, and stress over is truly for your Lord? What fears are holding you back? What’s stopping you from striving as fully as you could?

This is where the Last Day Leader experience could really help you.

Lose all sense of time

The second thing I’ve been doing is choosing at least one prayer a day where I completely drop my sense of time. I try to approach that prayer with zero rush, no sense of deadlines, and full mental presence.

You’ve probably experienced what happens when you're in a rush: you barely register the words, the movements blur into each other, and it becomes almost mechanical.

Instead, I’ve been even more deliberately slowing down, and especially when bowing and prostrating. I repeat phrases slowly, allow long pauses in between, giving time and space for reflection.

For example, when bowing, I say subhana rabbiyal ‘adhim – how perfect is my Lord, the Majestic – vee-ryy sloow-lyy, feeling the words and leaving space between repetitions to think about them.

I remind myself that I don’t have to keep speaking the whole time. Reflective silence is an overlooked element of a thoughtful prayer.

In prostration, I try to lose myself altogether: no thoughts of what’s next or where I need to be. I stay there, present, grateful, expressing myself from the heart.

Of course, life is busy. Sometimes we genuinely have things pulling on our time. But often, even when we don’t, we still rush our prayers. I’ve made it a point to commit at least one prayer each day to this deeper presence. When I do, it changes everything.

So perhaps you can consciously select at least one prayer a day when you’ll go into it with absolutely no sense or care for what’s to come afterwards.

Just lose yourself in divine connection and see what happens.

Use your phone!

This third point might feel unusual, but it’s had a massive impact on my own salat.

Even though I’ve memorised the Qur’an, I’ve started using my phone during prayers at home (in airplane mode) to recite directly from it. Why? Because now I can access any part of it even if my memory has become a little rusty, and it makes the engagement much more deliberate for the parts that I know well.

If you’re like most people, you have a very limited range of verses you recite in prayer. That often makes our engagement with revelation in prayer shallow and repetitive.

I've begun standing in salat with my phone in hand and allowing myself to recite for as along as my heart pleases, rather than being in a robotic mode of rushing through an oft-repeated small chapter.

If you don’t know the Arabic, what you can do is bring up the verse-by-verse translation alongside the Arabic of course. Recite the verse, then allow a silent pause to read the translation. Then move on.

This method will open up the whole Qur’an to you inside the prayer in a way that you likely haven't experienced before. Now you're no longer confined to just a few memorised chapters. You’ll be engaging with any aspect of it that you like, learning from it, absorbing its meanings, all during salat.

And guess what?

Because you’re finally exploring chapters and verses in your regular prayers that you otherwise rarely read, this helps with the point above: you become much more conscious and absorbed to the point that you might stand for much longer than you’re used to but without feeling it to be a burden. Notice how this synergises with the earlier point of losing your sense of time in prayer.

You're probably wondering whether this is even permissible.

But think about it: the early believers understood the revelation as it was being revealed. They were able to engage deeply and thoughtfully when long passages were being recited during the prayer... which was a massive - I'd say central - aspect of the point of the prayer itself: deep scriptural engagement!

If this approach helps us experience the same - and I believe it does - then surely that’s a good thing, maybe even a necessary thing.

Firstly, what good is technical adherence to subjective yet prescriptive legal restrictions when the spirit of the most important action of our lives is often entirely crushed?

Secondly, what could possibly be the harm? Why would our Lord reasonably reject this practice?

If you're worried about whether your Lord will accept such a prayer, I’d encourage you to think for yourself for a moment: are you truly trying to connect with His words and elevate your prayer with minimal physical or practical disruption? If so, would He dismiss your effort, or is it more likely He’d accept and reward it?

Isn't the real risk that the usual robotic engagement with a small handful of unconsciously chosen verses might be more of a reason for God to be offended than what would happen if you followed what I'm proposing above?

Give it a go and see how it not only transforms your standing but the rest of your prayer too.

Let me know your thoughts and, if you give any of the above a go, how you found the experience.

Until next time.

Peace.

Iqbal

~~~

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