Most of us meet Sulaiman (peace be upon him) as children, and we meet him through the spectacular bits. The wind carrying him. Armies that included jinn, the unseen creatures Allah created alongside humans and angels. Birds bringing him news from places he had never walked. A throne moved across a desert faster than anyone could explain.
Then we grow up and reread his story, and something quieter comes forward. The man with more than almost anyone in history spends a surprising amount of his Qur’anic story asking. Asking forgiveness. Asking to be made thankful. Turning back towards Allah when he had every worldly reason to feel settled.
That is the part worth sitting with, especially if you are raising children in a country where abundance is measured in things.
A prophet who was also a king
Sulaiman (peace be upon him) was the son of Dawud (peace be upon him), himself a prophet and a king, and he inherited both roles. Allah describes the knowledge given to the two of them in Surah an-Naml, the chapter named after the ants, and records their response to it: praise. Before the wind, before the jinn, before the famous throne, their first recorded reaction to being given something is to thank the One who gave it (an-Naml 27:15).
That order matters. Most of us receive first and notice later, usually when the thing is taken away.
He was also given something easy to overlook: understanding of the speech of birds, which he describes as a favour, not a trick. The Qur’an has him name it as a gift out loud (an-Naml 27:16). A prophet publicly crediting Allah for his own capability is not a small detail when you are trying to teach a child the difference between confidence and arrogance.
What dua did Prophet Sulaiman make for abundance?
His best-known dua for abundance is in Surah Sad, the chapter named after the Arabic letter Sad, where he says: “My Lord, forgive me and grant me a kingdom such as will not belong to anyone after me. Indeed, You are the Bestower” (Sad 38:35). The words for forgiveness come first, before the request for the kingdom, and the dua ends by naming Allah as al-Wahhab, the Bestower, the One whose giving is His own nature rather than a response to our deserving.
Read the verse immediately before it and the sequence becomes clearer still. Allah says that Sulaiman (peace be upon him) was tested, and that he turned back (Sad 38:34). The turning back is what the dua grows out of. He does not open with the ask.
This gets flattened a lot. You will find the verse circulating online as a wealth dua, lifted clean out of its setting, sometimes with a promise attached about how many times to repeat it. The Qur’an itself is more careful than that. A prophet asked for a kingdom no one after him would have, which is by definition not a request any of us are making, and he asked for it in a specific posture: forgiven first, dependent throughout, clear about the source.
If you want to take something from it into your own dua, take the shape rather than the shopping list. Seek forgiveness. Name Allah as the Giver. Then ask, plainly, for what you actually need.
He asked to be made grateful, not just to feel it
The other dua of his is the one I keep coming back to. In Surah an-Naml, after the incident with the ant, he says: “My Lord, enable me to be grateful for Your favour which You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents, and to do righteousness of which You approve, and admit me by Your mercy into the ranks of Your righteous servants” (an-Naml 27:19).
Look at what he is requesting. Not more favour. The ability to be grateful for the favour already there.
That is a theologically serious move, and it quietly dismantles how most of us think about shukr, thankfulness expressed in words and in action. We treat gratitude as a mood that should arrive on its own if the blessings are obvious enough. He treats it as a capacity that has to be granted, like eyesight or strength, and he asks for it directly.
Which rings true, honestly. Plenty of us have everything listed on a gratitude journal and still feel hollow on a Tuesday evening. The blessings were never the missing piece.
Notice too that he includes his parents in the dua. The favour he is thanking Allah for is not only what landed in his own lap; it reaches back a generation. For families, that is a usable idea. The home you were raised in, the deen you were handed, the fact that someone taught you to pray at all, all of it belongs in the thank-you.
What does the story of the ant teach children?
The story of the ant teaches that no creature is beneath notice and no amount of power excuses carelessness. Sulaiman (peace be upon him) overhears an ant warning the other ants to get into their homes so his approaching army does not crush them without realising, and his response is not offence at being treated as a hazard. The Qur’an says he smiled, amused at her speech, and then turned straight to Allah with the dua about gratitude (an-Naml 27:18-19).
A king with jinn in his service stops because of an ant.
For a child, that is a far more memorable lesson about character than any lecture on humility. The smallest voice in the story is the one that reaches him, and instead of being diminished by it he is made thankful by it. If you are reading this with a seven year old, that is the question to ask them: why did the ant make him say thank you?
There is also something in there about how gratitude actually gets triggered. Not by the wind or the kingdom or the throne. By a small moment that showed him his own position in creation.
Turning back, again and again
Before the Qur’an tells us anything about Sulaiman’s kingdom in Surah Sad, it gives him a description: an excellent servant, and one who repeatedly turned back (Sad 38:30). The Arabic word used is awwab, which carries the sense of returning over and over, not once.
This is the heart of tawba, the act of turning back to Allah in repentance. We tend to imagine it as a single dramatic event, the moment someone changes their life. The word applied to a prophet suggests otherwise. It is a direction you keep facing, and keep re-facing, because you keep drifting.
And the drift is not always sin in the obvious sense. Sometimes it is just forgetting who holds the thing you are holding.
A narration recorded in al-Bukhari, the most rigorously checked of the hadith collections, relates from the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ that Sulaiman (peace be upon him) once stated firmly what he intended to do without adding “if Allah wills”, and the outcome did not come as he had hoped. The Prophet ﷺ mentioned that had he said it, the outcome would have been different. A prophet. One phrase. It is a mercy that this was preserved for us, because it tells us exactly how fine the line is between planning and presuming.
Abundance is a test in both directions
When the throne of the queen of Saba, traditionally named Bilqis though the Qur’an does not name her, is brought before him, Sulaiman (peace be upon him) says something that should probably be written on the inside of every front door: “This is from the favour of my Lord to test me whether I will be grateful or ungrateful. And whoever is grateful, his gratitude is only for the benefit of himself. And whoever is ungrateful, then indeed my Lord is Free of need and Generous” (an-Naml 27:40).
Two things sit in there. The first is that receiving is itself the test, not the reward for passing one. The second is that our thankfulness does nothing for Allah. It is entirely for us. He is not waiting to be flattered.
Surah Saba, named after the people of Saba, puts it as an instruction. After listing the wind and the jinn and the work they did, Allah says: “Work, O family of Dawud, in gratitude. And few of My servants are grateful” (Saba 34:13). Gratitude as labour. Something you do with your hands and your time, not only something you say after eating.
Few, Allah says. Not none, but few.
What his staff left behind
His story ends with an image that undercuts every bit of the grandeur. He dies leaning on his staff, and the jinn carry on working, not realising, until a creature of the earth eats through the wood and he falls (Saba 34:14). The most powerful kingdom on earth did not notice its king had gone, because a piece of timber was still upright.
Everything he had was real. All of it was given. None of it was his to keep.
Which brings us back to the two duas, and why they are the right ones to teach children rather than the throne or the wind. One asks to be forgiven before it asks for anything. The other asks for the ability to say thank you properly. Between them they cover the whole of what a person actually needs when abundance arrives, and most of what they need when it does not.
Start there this week. Teach your household the dua from an-Naml 27:19, the short one about being enabled to be grateful, and say it after something good happens rather than only when something goes wrong. Then ask the ant question at dinner and let the children answer it.
Ten minutes. That is genuinely enough to start.