The Hours Off the Books
· 4 min read · Topics: faith, philosophy, society
وَمَا خَلَقْتُ ٱلْجِنَّ وَٱلْإِنسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونِ
And I did not create the jinn and mankind except that they should serve Me. — Qur'an 51:56
Ask a person when they last worshipped and you will be given a time. Sunday morning. Friday afternoon. The half hour after dawn, if they are keeping to it. The answer arrives with a clock attached, which tells you how the English word is working. Worship is an event with a start and an end. Whatever fills the other fifteen hours is something else, and we have no particular name for it.
The purpose of the creation of two whole orders of being is stated once, in eight words, and the last of them is ibadah. If that word means the event with the clock attached, then the purpose of creation is met in about an hour a day and the rest of a life is off the books. Nobody believes that when it is put plainly. We arrange our days as though it were true anyway, and I think the arrangement follows the word.
What the root carries
The word is built on the root that gives abd: a slave, the opposite of a free man, and also the ordinary word for a human being, since a human being belongs to his Maker. The lexicons give ibadah as obedience with humility, and ubudiyyah, from the same three letters, is servitude itself - the standing of one who belongs to someone.
Applied to a camel, the intensive form means broken in, worked with until the animal goes where it is put. Applied to a road, it means beaten, trodden by enough traffic over enough years to be smooth and passable. Neither of those is a ceremony. Both describe a thing shaped by long use to somebody else's purpose.
"Worship" is weorthscipe, worth-ship, and in its older senses it means honour, esteem, renown, and the ceremony by which honour is shown. One names an attitude and its observances. The other names a standing - whose you are, and who is entitled to give the orders.
What a servant is judged on
Worship in the narrow sense produces records of attendance: whether I went, how many, whether I got there before the time ran out. An estate can be run into the ground by a man whose attendance is perfect, and nothing in that record will show it.
Two men hold the same belief and translate one word differently. The first has worshipped by nine in the morning and treats the account as settled until the afternoon. What falls between is neutral ground. He invoices six hours for four, because the client never queries it. He agreed thirty days with his supplier and pays on ninety. He keeps three hundred pounds of a deposit against a carpet that was worn when the tenant moved in. None of that reaches him as a religious matter. It is business, business has its own rules, and the evening will square things up.
The second takes the word to mean what he is rather than what he attends. The invoice says four hours. The supplier is paid on the thirtieth day. The boiler is fixed in the week it failed, not the month before the inspection. He has no neutral hours to trade in and no evening in which to settle up, because there was never a second ledger the day was being kept out of.
Under the narrow word none of that sits on the religious account; it is ethics, or professionalism, or being a decent sort. Under the wider one it is the job. The word a man uses decides which parts of his life he believes he is answerable for, and I have been the first man without once noticing it.
This does not make the hour smaller. The prayer is the servant reporting in, and a servant who reports in and then does nothing has still done nothing.
The test that cannot be applied
I wrote earlier about the quiet altars, and the test that comes with them: does this help me keep the Trust, or does it quietly become the thing I serve? The narrow word removes that test before it can be applied. Nobody sings to a spreadsheet. Nobody kneels to a feed. But obedience, the arranged day and the surrendered hour are precisely what those things ask for, and get. A road does not consent to being a road. It is used until it takes the shape of the traffic.
A master who takes nothing
The sentence immediately after the epigraph says that God wants no provision from them, and does not want them to feed Him. It is a strange thing to say to slaves. A master keeps servants because he needs the harvest brought in. The verse after that names Him as the one who provides, and possessed of strength.
Everything else that asks for our service takes something: hours, attention, health, principle, the futures of children, and calls the taking an investment. This one requires the service and takes nothing from it. The service is for the servant, and for the estate he was put in charge of.
We are named khulafa - custodians of an earth we did not make and must hand back. A custodian is not waiting for the hour of service to begin. He is already in it. My practice is small. When I catch myself calling a stretch of the day "time off", I ask off what.
There is no hour that is not on the account.
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