Most of us meet the suffering of other Muslims through a screen, and usually at the worst possible moment. Between the school run and the kettle. Three minutes before a meeting. You see something you will not be able to unsee, you feel the floor tilt a little, and then your name is called from the next room and the day carries on without you.
What follows is often a strange mix of grief and uselessness. We feel the weight but cannot find the handle. So we scroll a bit more, because scrolling at least feels like attention, and attention at least feels like solidarity.
There is an older response, and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ taught it with his own mouth, out loud, standing in prayer in front of the congregation. It is worth looking at closely, because it is more specific than most of us assume.
The ummah has carried this before
The ummah, the worldwide body of Muslims understood as one community, did not begin in comfort. Its first years in Makkah were years of open cruelty, and the record of that period is not vague about who suffered.
Bilal ibn Rabah (may Allah be pleased with him) was enslaved and tortured for refusing to abandon his faith. Sumayyah bint Khayyat (may Allah be pleased with her) is remembered as the first person killed for believing. Whole families were pushed out of trade and marriage and ordinary social life under a boycott that confined the Prophet ﷺ and his wider clan to a valley outside the town, where food was scarce enough that people are reported to have eaten leaves.
Some of the Companions, the generation who lived alongside the Prophet ﷺ and learned directly from him, were sent across the sea to Abyssinia, in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, where a Christian king known in Arabic sources as an-Najashi gave them protection. Years later came the hijrah, the migration of the Muslim community from Makkah to Madinah that marks the start of the Islamic calendar.
But not everyone got out. That detail matters for what comes next.
What is the dua for the oppressed?
The dua for the oppressed most often referred to is the supplication the Prophet ﷺ made inside his prayer for Muslims who were trapped and being harmed in Makkah after the rest of the community had reached Madinah. It is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari (hadith 3386), the collection compiled by al-Bukhari (may Allah have mercy on him) and generally treated as the most rigorously checked of the hadith collections.
He said it in qunut, which simply means a dua said while standing in prayer, out loud, rather than silently in your heart. The narration describes him making it in the dawn prayer, in the standing that comes after he rose from bowing. The congregation behind him could hear every word.
And every word included names. He asked Allah to rescue Ayyash ibn Abi Rabi’ah (may Allah be pleased with him). He asked Allah to rescue Salamah ibn Hisham (may Allah be pleased with him). He asked Allah to rescue al-Walid ibn al-Walid (may Allah be pleased with him). Then he widened it to the believers who were weak and overpowered, the ones with no name anybody in Madinah would have recognised. And he asked Allah to deal severely with Mudar, the broad tribal grouping that the Quraysh of Makkah belonged to, the people doing the harm.
That is the shape of it. Named individuals, then the unnamed many, then the wrongdoing itself.
Naming names changes the dua
It would have been easier, and more comfortable, to say something general. May Allah help the Muslims. May Allah relieve the suffering of the oppressed. We say versions of this constantly, and there is nothing wrong with the words.
The difference is that a general dua asks nothing of your memory. Naming a person does. To say Salamah ibn Hisham in your prayer, you have to have found out who Salamah ibn Hisham is, and what has been done to him, and you have to have kept that in your head long enough to carry it from the news into the prayer mat. The dua forces the knowing.
There is a second thing, harder to put down on paper. Being named in someone’s prayer is a form of being refused as a statistic. The men the Prophet ﷺ named were, from the outside, three unremarkable detainees in a hostile city, exactly the sort of people who vanish from a story while the story moves on. They did not vanish. They were spoken aloud, at dawn, by name, in front of witnesses.
The Qur’an does something similar in Surah an-Nisa, the chapter named The Women, where it asks why believers would not act for the sake of the weak among the men, the women and the children who cry out to their Lord to be taken out of a place of oppression (4:75). Note what it does not say. It does not say the oppressed. It counts them: men, women, children. Specificity is a mercy.
The dua of the person being crushed
There is a related teaching that should unsettle anyone with any kind of power, however small. When the Prophet ﷺ sent Mu’adh ibn Jabal (may Allah be pleased with him) to Yemen to teach and to govern, he warned him about the supplication of a person who has been wronged, telling him that there is nothing standing between that dua and Allah.
Read that from both ends. If you are the one being wronged, you have not been left weaponless, even when every worldly door is shut. If you are the one who might do the wronging, in a business deal, in a marriage, over a worker’s wages, then the person you have shortchanged has a direct line that no amount of status interrupts.
It also quietly rules out a certain kind of posturing. You cannot thunder about the oppression of Muslims abroad while running a household or a shop on quiet injustice. The same ears are receiving both.
How do I talk to my children about suffering in the ummah?
Keep it short, keep it honest at a level they can hold, and never leave them standing in the horror with nothing to do about it. A child who is told that something terrible is happening and then handed no action will file the information as fear; a child who is told the same thing and then taken to make dua, or to put money in a tin, learns that pain has a response.
Some things that tend to work in British Muslim homes, where the news arrives in English on a device you do not fully control:
- Answer the question they asked, not the bigger one you are carrying. “Are children getting hurt?” has a true, two-sentence answer. It does not require footage.
- Let them choose a name. Children are astonishingly good at the sunnah of specificity. Give them one family, one city, one named person to pray for, and they will remember it long after you have.
- Pair it with history. A nine year old who knows what happened to Bilal (may Allah be pleased with him) has a frame to put today’s news into, and understands that the ummah has been here before and did not end.
- Let them see you cry and then see you act. The acting is the lesson. The crying just makes it credible.
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And protect their sleep. A child does not need the ten o’clock images in order to have a soft heart.
Small, steady and specific beats big and occasional
The Prophet ﷺ did not make that dua once in a burst of feeling. The narration describes a practice, something the congregation came to expect in the dawn prayer. Consistency is the part we usually skip.
If you want something that survives past this week, build it small enough to keep:
- One fixed slot. Pick a prayer, any prayer, and attach the dua to it permanently. After the final sitting, before you stand up. Thirty seconds.
- Three names. Find them from a reputable aid organisation or a journalist on the ground, write them on paper, and keep the paper where you pray. Change them when you learn new ones.
- A standing order, not a splurge. Set up sadaqah, voluntary charity given in whatever amount you choose, as a monthly payment at an amount you will not quietly cancel in February. Then check whether you have actually calculated your zakat this year, the obligatory annual payment of a fixed share of your qualifying wealth, since that is a right owed rather than a kindness offered.
- One letter, properly written. Writing to your MP is unglamorous and genuinely counted. Ten minutes, your own words, your own postcode.
- Learn something. Ten minutes on the seerah, the life of the Prophet ﷺ, does more for your resilience than an hour of footage, because it teaches you the shape that hardship takes and how it ends.
- Cap the scroll. Decide the number of minutes before you open the app, not during. Grief that has nowhere to go turns into numbness, and numbness is not solidarity.
None of this is impressive. That is the point. The things that last in a family are the things nobody has to be heroic to do on a wet Tuesday in November.
What the dua does to the one making it
Sahih Muslim, another of the great early hadith collections, compiled by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (may Allah have mercy on him), records the Prophet ﷺ describing the believers in their mutual love and mercy as one body: when one part of it is in pain, the whole body is kept awake by it.
Most of us know that feeling without knowing the hadith. The restlessness is not a malfunction. It is the body reporting an injury somewhere else in itself, and the correct response to a reported injury is not to turn the volume down.
What dua does, though, is hand the matter to the only One who can actually settle it, while keeping you awake and involved rather than paralysed. It is not the thing you do when the options run out. The Prophet ﷺ had a community, a city and an army, and he still stood at dawn and said three men’s names.
So tomorrow at Fajr, before you fold the mat away, say one name out loud. You will not know what it changed. You are not meant to.