The Day A Duā Died

Appropriation, Obfuscation, and the Whitewashing of Spiritual Resistance

Just a few nights ago, I was going through my old collection of Islamic books—some packed away, some forgotten on a bottom shelf—and there it was: The Prayer of the Oppressed. I hadn’t touched it in years, but as soon as I saw the cover, that same feeling came rushing back. The unease. The grief. The betrayal I didn’t yet have language for. I held it in my hands, but it felt like it was holding me—reminding me that this wasn't just a book. It was a moment. A rupture. A turning point.

And now, as I watch the relentless escalation of state-sponsored terror—massacres framed as security, genocide laundered through policy, entire peoples criminalized for surviving—I feel it even more acutely. The pain isn’t abstract. It’s everywhere. It’s in the streets, in the masajid, in the timelines and feeds. And somehow, it’s still not in the hearts of those who claim to speak for the tradition.

Watching so-called scholars slither around the truth, using tradition like a shield to protect their proximity to power, I finally understand why this betrayal has stayed lodged so deep. Why it still stings. Because it wasn’t just about the book. Itg wasnt even about one man. It was about what it meant to be Black, Muslim, and unseen. It was about watching a sacred cry for liberation turned into a sanitized artifact for the spiritually comfortable. It was about realizing—painfully, unmistakably—that if we don’t guard our voices, they will be stolen, softened, and sold back to us devoid of the very fire that gave them life.

I remember the moment it began—not as a declaration, but as a disturbance.

It was 2011, and I held in my hands a beautifully bound copy of The Prayer of the Oppressed. The calligraphy was flawless. The translation elegant. The reputation of its editor— Br. Hamza Yusuf—nearly untouchable in the Muslim spaces I had grown up navigating. I opened it expecting validation, affirmation—perhaps some consolation and clarity. What I found instead was a contradiction I couldn’t unsee.

I knew the duʿāʾ well. I mean the original one—the Arabic one—the one passed down with trembling reverence in circles where liberation was more than metaphor. I knew the story behind it: the courage of Imam Muḥammad b. Nāṣir al-Darʿī, the resistance it represented, the way it traveled through time as both a prayer and a refusal. It resonated with me because it wasn’t abstract. It felt like it was written for people like me—for people carrying the memory of chains, of ships, of silence. It promised that Allah was listening, that our tears were not going unnoticed, that our rage was not blasphemy but barakah.

I wasn’t looking for a savior. I wasn’t looking for a messiah. I wasn’t even looking for a teacher. What I wanted—what I needed—was a sign that our voices were reaching the Throne. That the duʿāʾ of the Black oppressed was still alive in the ummah’s heart, not just in our margins.

I didn’t need the book. But I wanted to believe in the possibility that its prominent publication could signal something righteous. That maybe, just maybe, the prophetic imperative—to stand with the maẓlūm, to name the Pharaoh, to dignify the wounded—was being reawakened.

Instead, I found a duʿāʾ dressed for display. A prayer reinterpreted by someone who had already dismissed our grief in public, defended the systems that crushed us, and refused to name the very forms of ẓulm the original duʿāʾ called upon Allah to destroy.

Even then—before the statements, before the forums, before the controversies—I felt the absence. The lack of moral depth. The presence of something polished but hollow. But I didn’t fully understand it at the time. Not yet.

And everywhere I turned, I saw celebration. I witnessed effusive praise for Hamza Yusuf—praise that bordered on reverence, even sanctification. Muslims—especially white converts and immigrant elites—spoke of him as a kind of mujaddid, a renewer of the age, and treated the publication of this duʿāʾ as an event. There were blog posts and newsletters, poetry and Facebook tributes, glowing with awe at his “service” to the ummah, his “revival” of sacred tradition. The Sandala blog even described the duʿāʾ as a text “brought out of obscurity,” as if the voices who had kept it alive in colonized and oppressed lands didn’t exist until a white-presenting scholar brought it into their view. They praised the gold leaf, the textured paper, the “timeless message”—but they rarely mentioned the people it was meant for. We were invisible in the book's presentation just as we were being silenced in the streets.

I remember attending gatherings where non-Black Muslims, especially white converts (but not all), would weep openly while reciting it. They clutched the book like it was a lifeline, read it aloud in theatrical tones, and spoke of how healing it was for their souls. And yet, in those same spaces, they dismissed Black Muslims calling out anti-Blackness. They silenced critiques of police violence. They rolled their eyes at protests and scoffed at any reminder that Muslims too could uphold white supremacy. I saw people cry through the duʿāʾ and then change the subject when we spoke of Black pain. They honored the text but ignored the reality. They loved the sound of the oppressed but hated the actual presence of the oppressed in their communities.

This is what I sensed. This is what stuck in my heart. As anti-Blackness swelled and Black Muslim marginalization rose again—quietly in the mosques, loudly in the streets—I felt the hollowness deepen. Here was a product being so feverishly consumed, adorned with aesthetics of reverence, but emptied of its essential heart and prophetic voice. The duʿāʾ had been extracted from its lifeblood—its people—and served back to the community like a relic: beautiful, admired, and dead.

Instead of a Black prayer of the oppressed, it had become a white prayer for the oppressed—and not even for their liberation, but for their containment. Not to free them from oppression, but to spiritually pacify them within it. Not to rescue them from whiteness, but to drape that whiteness in devotional language and sell it back to them as sacred. The prayer had been rerouted—its fire dimmed, its blood washed off, its divine indictment replaced with genericized pseudospiritual inspiration.

What I found wasn’t clarity.
It was distortion.

What I felt wasn’t comfort.
It was betrayal.

Still, I didn’t have the full language for it—not yet. But then came RIS. Then came the statements. The interviews. The defenses of police violence. The dismissal of Black protest. The false balance between state power and Black death. And suddenly, it all made sense.

Of course he could do such a thing to something so sacred.
Of course he could reinterpret a cry for liberation into a salve for the powerful.
This wasn’t a misstep. It was a revelation.

What I had felt in 2011 was the spiritual distance. the dissonance already present—the disconnection between the duʿāʾ’s origin and the man who claimed to carry it forward. His heart had already traveled far from the prophetic alignment that centers the oppressed. RIS didn’t change the meaning of the book—it simply confirmed what the book had already exposed.

I didn’t know it then, but I had just witnessed the day a duʿāʾ died.

This essay is not just a critique of one man—it is an excavation of the system that made such a betrayal invisible, profitable, and even praiseworthy. It is a mapping of the White Minbar™, where aesthetics replace alignment, where tradition is performed but never risked, and where Black sacred memory is repeatedly appropriated, edited, and erased.

It is also an act of reclamation. Of Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn as it was meant to be: an urgent flood of devotion in the heart and throat of the wounded, a weapon in the hands of the downtrodden, a witness before God when no one else will testify.

This is where it began for me. This is why it still matters.

This is what this essay is meant to be.

An exploration of how and why this happened—and how and why it keeps happening.

Because if we do not tell the truth about this distortion, this pattern will not just persist—it will deepen. And if the oppressed themselves do not pray in their own voices, on their own terms, from within their own cosmologies and spiritual authority, then the prayer will continue to be stolen, softened, and repackaged by others.

We are now in a moment where neotraditional, post-colonial, white Christian nationalist–aligned, and techno-supremacist scholarship is increasingly defining for us the conditions of our own divine address. They are telling us how, when, and even if we may be heard by Allah. And too often, that permission comes with erasure.

This essay is a personal refusal.

A refusal to let the White Minbar™ set the terms of our duʿāʾ.
A refusal to let The Madhab of the White Jesus delineate the terms or forms of our intercession
A refusal to let sanitized religiosity bury the voices that tremble with truth.
A refusal to believe that prophetic proximity can exist without prophetic alignment.

“If the oppressed themselves don't pray in their own voices, neotraditional post-colonial white Christian nationalist and supremacist scholarship will continue to define for the beaten, bombed, shot, stolen, slaughtered, and enslaved when and where and how we should be heard by Allah, if we should be heard at all.”

A Prayer of the Hebrews Repackaged to Appease Pharaoh

There are moments in the life of a community when the betrayal of principle is so flagrant, so profound, that it demands to be named. One such moment was the 2010 publication of The Prayer of the Oppressed (Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn), a classical devotional poem of spiritual defiance authored by Imam Muhammad b. Nasir al-Darʿī of 17th-century Morocco. Rendered into English and adorned with ornate calligraphy, high-production audio, and marketing fanfare, this translation was presented to the Muslim world under the banner of Hamza Yusuf—a white American scholar increasingly known not for prophetic resistance, but for political alignment with authoritarianism, settler colonialist normalization, American exceptionalism, and anti-Black condescension.

Framed as a universal Islamic spiritual remedy, the publication of The Prayer of the Oppressed by Yusuf’s Pathways press was lauded by institutions and individuals hungry for aestheticized, apolitical spirituality. But beneath the surface, it was something else entirely. This was not merely a translation. It was an act of epistemic laundering: the transformation of a searing, Godward cry for liberation into a palatable product that neither names oppression nor indicts the oppressors. It was an erasure—of history, of specificity, and of the sacred lineage of resistance that birthed the prayer in the first place.

To many Black Muslims, this act did not go unnoticed. Quietly, many described it as spiritual gentrification—a term that captures the deep discomfort of seeing the pain, prayers, and sacred inheritances of Black and colonized peoples repackaged and sold by those who not only remain silent in the face of their suffering, but actively defend the systems that produce it. How could a man who publicly downplayed police brutality, criticized the Black Lives Matter movement for its “victim mentality,” and aligned himself with regimes and ideologies hostile to justice, be the face of a prayer that cries out on behalf of the oppressed?

The publication of The Prayer of the Oppressed represented not only a broader symbolic and progressively worsening betrayal, but a paradigmatic example of the White Minbar™ in action—the public-facing mechanism of the Madhab of the White Jesus™ (MOTWJ), where white religious authority is constructed through borrowed sanctity, performative humility, and the aesthetic of moral leadership, all while remaining insulated from the lived realities of the oppressed. It is a case study in how sacred resistance is repackaged as spiritual respectability—stripped of its fire, sold back to the faithful, and weaponized against the very communities it once empowered.

Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn: A Sacred Cry for Justice

To grasp the full weight of the betrayal, one must first understand what Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn actually is—and what it was meant to be. Composed by the 17th-century Moroccan scholar and saint Imam Muḥammad b. Nāṣir al-Darʿī (d. 1085/1674), this prayer was not written from the safety of power, but from within the furnace of historical trauma. Al-Darʿī was no idle mystic. He was the founder of the Nāṣiriyya ṭarīqa, a spiritual order rooted in both prophetic love and public justice. His legacy rests not only in theological treatises, but in the organization of spiritual, educational, and economic lifelines for communities facing colonial violence, internal corruption, and the psychic injuries of enslavement and domination.

The Prayer of the Oppressed is a devotional supplication (duʿāʾ) that bears the unmistakable imprint of the Qur’anic tradition of calling upon Allah against injustice. It echoes the plea of the Prophet Musa (ʿalayhi al-salām) when he witnessed the abuse of his people. It stands in the same river of divine recourse as the duʿāʾs of Bilāl, Sumayyah, and the Prophets who cried out under the weight of worldly oppression. Theologically, it is a call rooted in tawḥīd, where reliance upon God is not passive, but a reclamation of dignity and divine proximity through invocation. Linguistically, it is structured with Qur’anic cadence, invoking Allah’s Names in rhythmic succession, each one chosen to match a specific social or spiritual affliction. The oppressed cry, and the Divine responds—not in silence, but in majesty.

This is not an abstract or therapeutic exercise. It is a political and eschatological act. In Islamic tradition, the prayer of the oppressed (daʿwat al-maẓlūm) bypasses all veils, reaching God even if the oppressed be a disbeliever. The duʿāʾ is not just heard—it is avenged. The Messenger of God ﷺ said, “Beware the prayer of the oppressed, for there is no barrier between it and Allah.” To recite such a prayer is to join a sacred lineage of protest before the Throne of God.

It is within this context that al-Darʿī’s duʿāʾ emerged—not as a general plea for mercy or spiritual healing, but as a weaponized invocation in the mouths of the colonized, the enslaved, and the violated. It gave voice to the groans of a people whose tongues may have been chained by empire, but whose hearts thundered with tawakkul and refusal.

When one understands this, it becomes clear why the prayer holds such reverence among Black Muslim descendants of the enslaved, many of whom see in it the spiritual continuity of ancestral cries from plantation fields, slave forts, and oceanic graves. The duʿāʾ is not just liturgy—it is testimony. It is what was whispered by the bound, uttered in coded zikr under the lash, and carried through the lineages of spiritual resistance.

To strip this prayer of its historical and racial context is not just an oversight. It is a violence. And to present it—repackaged, aestheticized, and neutralized—by a man unwilling to name or confront the very systems it resists, is a desecration masquerading as devotion.

Sanitized Resistance – The Packaging of Privilege

When The Prayer of the Oppressed was released by Hamza Yusuf’s Pathways press in 2010, it arrived adorned in the aesthetics of sacred reverence: a glossy bilingual print edition, elegant Arabic calligraphy, a companion CD with recitations by Mauritanian scholars, and a promotional rollout that invoked spiritual urgency without naming material injustice. The production was immaculate. But the politics were sanitized. What had once been a raw invocation against tyranny was now repackaged as a soothing spiritual balm, marketable to Western Muslims seeking tranquility rather than justice.

From the outset, Yusuf’s version abandoned the specific historical gravity of the duʿāʾ’s origins. Nowhere in the introduction is the anti-colonial resistance of Imam al-Darʿī mentioned. There is no contextualization of the prayer’s place within the lived realities of North African Muslims under early modern imperial encroachment. The prayer’s deep resonance with the enslaved and the dispossessed is flattened into a general meditation on human suffering. What was once a cry against ẓulm (injustice) is diluted into a discourse on spiritual weakness, personal ego, and the inner nafs.

Instead of indicting systems, Yusuf shifts focus to the individual. In his introduction, he writes, “We are all oppressors in some sense,” inviting readers to understand the duʿāʾ not as a confrontation with worldly tyrants, but as a tool for addressing the tyranny of the self. What appears on the surface as a pious reminder of personal accountability is, in fact, a rhetorical sleight of hand—one that disarms the radical power of the prayer by internalizing its targets and pathologizing the oppressed themselves.

Spiritual Bypass as Control: The Pathologizing of Oppression

This move is not accidental. It is a deliberate mechanism of the White Minbar™, the performative pulpit of the Madhab of the White Jesus™ (MOTWJ). It is the space where spiritual vocabulary is used not to confront injustice but to manage it—to anesthetize moral outrage, to neutralize resistance, and to reframe collective suffering as a matter of internal imbalance. In this architecture, the colonial whip becomes a metaphor for spiritual failure, not a call to liberation.

By declaring that “we are all oppressors,” Yusuf performs a collapse of moral clarity. He constructs a false equivalence between the colonizer and the colonized, the jailer and the jailed, the regime that bombs and the refugee who flees. This is not humility—it is a refusal to confront structural injustice on its own terms. It blurs the very lines that the Qur’an draws clearly between the mustakbirīn (arrogant tyrants) and the mustadʿafīn (those rendered weak and voiceless on earth). It is a betrayal of the Qur’anic ethic of siding with the oppressed without ambiguity.

Moreover, Yusuf’s invocation of personal tyranny reframes Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn as a therapeutic tool, rather than a theological intervention. Instead of being a cry to God against injustice, the duʿāʾ becomes a whisper to the self about spiritual inadequacy. This rhetorical shift lifts the prayer out of its historical soil and suspends it in the air of abstract piety. It becomes a consumable spiritual product—detached from context, stripped of teeth, and marketed to Muslims whose primary relationship to suffering is voyeuristic or performative.

The most dangerous outcome of this framing is that it disarms the believer. It discourages outrage. It discourages naming. It discourages resistance. What results is not empowerment, but pacification. It is the theological equivalent of telling the enslaved to search their hearts for pride while the chains remain unbroken. It is a divine gaslighting—performed in Arabic, wrapped in calligraphy, and presented as humility.

And it protects power. Yusuf’s re-centering of the individual over the structural conveniently shields the very systems he has aligned himself with—whether through silence on the UAE’s political repression, his defense of police violence in America, or his public dismissal of Black-led protest movements as lacking in “personal responsibility.”

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When systemic violence becomes “the tyranny of the self, then no oppressor need fear exposure. The message becomes clear: suffering is your spiritual lesson, not their moral crime.

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Piety as Propaganda: Aestheticization and Sedation

The production choices reinforce this theology. The CD accompaniment features slow, elegant recitations, carefully engineered for emotional resonance. But resonance is not the same as truth. The maqām is beautiful—but the oppressed do not cry in melody. They wail. They scream. They tremble. The duʿāʾ of the maẓlūm is jagged, raw, and full of trembling urgency. Yusuf’s version wraps this pain in silk, modulating it for audiences that prefer aesthetic reverence over moral reckoning.

This is not minor. It is political. It is a soft power strategy—one that converts the sacred resistance of the colonized into a luxury spiritual experience for post-colonial elites. In this version, the prayer becomes less about confronting injustice and more about managing discomfort. Listeners are not called to act—they are invited to reflect. They are not asked to ally with the oppressed—they are asked to sympathize with themselves.

The result is that the duʿāʾ becomes not a weapon of the oppressed, but a mirror for the comfortable. A mirror that shows no chains, no blood, no grief—only the gentle reminder that perhaps we, too, are flawed. That perhaps we, too, could be better people. It is the decolonization of Islam without the decolonization of power. It is resistance that offends no one. A revolution you can purchase. A cry for justice that rhymes.

From Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn to Duʿāʾ al-Muʿaqqamīn

What Yusuf offers is not Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn—the cry of the wronged. He offers Duʿāʾ al-Muʿaqqamīn—the prayer of the purified, the pacified, the perfectly positioned. It is a prayer stripped of its history, declawed of its rage, and rebranded for consumption by those most protected from what it actually says. And in doing so, Yusuf does more than misrepresent a sacred text—he severs it from the mouths of those to whom it rightly belongs.

In the end, The Prayer of the Oppressed in Yusuf’s hands is not a call to justice, but a case study in betrayal. It is resistance made respectable. And that, in the age of spiritual gentrification, is its most dangerous form.

Public Betrayals and Privatized Piety

To understand the full depth of the harm caused by Yusuf’s repackaging of The Prayer of the Oppressed, one must examine the public record. The issue is not just the aesthetic laundering of a sacred text—it is the political and ethical dissonance between the prayer’s invocation of divine justice and Yusuf’s own repeated refusal to stand with the oppressed in their earthly demands for it.

In 2016, just four years later, during a televised interview with journalist Mehdi Hasan, Yusuf was asked to comment on the Black Lives Matter movement. Rather than express solidarity or even sympathy, he responded with familiar dog whistles cloaked in spiritual language. “There are far more white people killed by police,” he said, “but you don’t see people rioting over that.” He spoke of “black-on-black crime,” implying that Black communities were their own worst enemies. He questioned the legitimacy of systemic critiques of racism in America, claiming the United States was “one of the least racist societies in the world.” These were not slips of the tongue. They were doctrinal positions, voiced with calm confidence and moral certainty.

This is not just a disagreement over policy. It is a theological betrayal. For a man who had positioned himself as the voice of Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn—a prayer that calls upon God against ẓulm in all its forms—to then deny the existence or specificity of systemic ẓulm against Black people is not a contradiction. It is a collapse of credibility.

Even when confronted with backlash, Yusuf did not walk back his comments in full. In subsequent statements, he doubled down on his rejection of “victimhood culture,” repeating his allegiance to ideals of “personal responsibility” and individual reform over structural critique. He offered vague qualifications—such as “BLM as a sentiment may be valid, but not the organization”—without ever acknowledging that the core of Black resistance was not organizational but existential: a demand for life, dignity, and divine recognition in the face of state-sanctioned death.

But perhaps most revealing is his silence in moments when moral clarity was most needed. During the Muslim Ban, Yusuf’s public focus was not on protest, but on prayer. During the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, he remained largely quiet. During Trump’s rise, he appeared at interfaith galas with administration-adjacent figures, preaching harmony while communities were under siege. His presence at the UAE-sponsored Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, alongside actors of repression and surveillance, only deepened the disconnect.

This is not neutrality. It is complicity.

The Prophetic model is not one of balanced distance, but of principled alignment. The Prophet ﷺ stood with Bilāl not just spiritually, but politically. He sided with the weak, challenged the powerful, and never masked oppression with rhetorical symmetry. To claim spiritual leadership while avoiding moral positioning is to build a platform on the backs of the oppressed and then use it to wave from a safe distance.

Yusuf’s betrayal is not merely in what he has said—it is in what he refuses to say. In every moment where his voice could have amplified the maẓlūm, he has chosen instead to pacify the audience, protect the powerful, serve on Zionist normalizing appointments and spiritualize selective silence. And all the while, he continues to speak as though his proximity to the sacred texts gives him license to define what justice looks like for the rest of us.

But sacred proximity without sacred allegiance is just performance. And when that performance is praised, platformed, and defended by institutions, it becomes part of a systemic betrayal—a pattern where those who betray the oppressed are forgiven faster than the oppressed are believed.

This is not just personal hypocrisy. It is the architecture of the White Minbar™: where betrayal is rehabilitated through eloquence, where alignment with power is forgiven under the guise of wisdom, and where the cries of the marginalized are muffled beneath the applause of the respectable.

The White Minbar™ in Action

Hamza Yusuf and his comtemporaries are not an anomalies. There is a function. A visible and celebrated representative of something far older and more entrenched: the White Minbar™—the performative platform of religious authority where whiteness, proximity to power, and selective piety converge into a mechanism of moral legitimacy. In this model, Islamic leadership becomes not a vehicle for resistance, but a tool for managing dissent. It is not a contradiction that Yusuf could offer The Prayer of the Oppressed while defending the systems that crush them. It is the logic of the White Minbar™ at work.

The White Minbar™ is not simply about skin color—though it often hides behind the innocence of whiteness. It is about positionality: who is allowed to speak for the ummah, who is elevated as a spiritual exemplar, and whose suffering is allowed to shape the public discourse of Islam. It is the architecture through which empire launders its legitimacy by anointing the safe scholar—one fluent in sacred language but unwilling to wield it against tyranny.

On this platform, resistance must be edited. Spirituality must be curated. Anger must be pathologized. The oppressed are allowed to speak—but only if they cry in ways that do not disturb the donors, the regimes, or the board of trustees. The White Minbar™ offers a theology of serenity, not struggle—a religion of refinement that trades in the aesthetics of tradition while severing its revolutionary roots.

Hamza Yusuf’s curated edition of Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn fits this model precisely. It is a text born of pain, now used to soothe the powerful. It is a prayer against injustice, now redirected inward. By translating, publishing, and publicizing the text while rejecting its core political and racial implications, Yusuf performs what this system requires: spiritual gentrification. That is, the aesthetic takeover of sacred texts authored in defiance of empire, repurposed to serve the spiritual needs of those who benefit from its order.

And this appropriation does not occur in a vacuum. It is protected and platformed by institutions that claim to represent the global Muslim community. Universities, publishing houses, interfaith organizations, and elite conferences continue to center voices like Yusuf’s while sidelining Black Muslim scholars, community organizers, and survivors of systemic violence. It is not just a matter of tone—it is a matter of epistemic control.

This is the full operation of the White Minbar™:

• The authority to speak on behalf of the oppressed while villifying them for struggling against oppression

• The right to package liberation theology in apolitical wrappers, edited for consumption.

• The ability to mine the devotional labor of colonized and enslaved peoples while aligning with the very powers that continue to oppress them.

In this model, the revolutionary is made respectable. The duʿāʾ is made decorative. And the pulpit becomes a shield—not from tyranny, but for it.

To dismantle this system, it is not enough to call out hypocrisy. We must decolonize the minbar itself. We must ask: Who has the right to interpret our pain? Who is given the mic when we cry out? And who gets to sell us back our sacred texts, severed from the blood that birthed them?

The White Minbar™ is not just a critique—it is a map. A map of how betrayal is dressed in turban and robe, and how the pain of the maẓlūm is still being stolen—line by line, verse by verse, in the name of Islam.

Reclaiming What Could Never Be Stolen

Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn was never meant to be sold. It was never meant to be curated for comfort, stripped of its teeth, or offered up by those unwilling to name the Pharaohs of their time. It was a sacred cry, a theologically anchored act of refusal, a whispered resistance passed down through the marrow of those crushed by history but not consumed by it.

To reclaim this prayer is not merely a matter of translation—it is a matter of justice.

We must remember that this text was born in the mouths of the oppressed. It lived in the tongues of enslaved Africans, colonized Moroccans, and silenced prophets. It survived not because it was beautifully packaged, but because it was urgently needed. It gave language to the voiceless, dignity to the humiliated, and cosmic weight to earthly pain. It was—and remains—a threat to every structure that benefits from silence.

When Hamza Yusuf assumed authority over this sacred text without assuming the risk, grief, or solidarity that comes with it, he did not preserve the duʿāʾ—he profaned it. He cloaked it in polish and presented it to an audience that has historically ignored, silenced, or co-opted Black Muslim pain. His publication was not an act of service—it was an act of spiritual occupation. He entered a house built on Black suffering and claimed the keys without asking permission.

But this is not about him alone. It is about a system that made his betrayal invisible. It is about the platforms that celebrated the release of The Prayer of the Oppressed while erasing the very communities it was written for. It is about the spiritual arrogance that believes sacred texts are safe in the hands of scholars who will not weep with the weeping or rage with the wronged. It is about the colonial logic that sees the spiritual as separate from the political, and the pain of the oppressed as a subject to be interpreted—never avenged.

To reclaim this prayer, we must return it to the mouths that understand its weight. We must teach it in our communities, not as a decorative reading, but as a weapon of invocation. We must say the names of our martyrs, invoke the Names of God with trembling urgency, and reconnect our devotions to our demands for freedom.

We must also build new minbars—ones where Blackness is not tolerated but centered, where our theology is forged in the fires of struggle, not the approval of empire. We must refuse the false spiritualities that ask us to be quiet while we are crushed.

Because Duʿāʾ al-Maẓlūmīn is not just a text.

It is a mirror. A weapon. A witness.

I wonder sometimes what the saint and servant of Allah and his people, authorof the original Duʿāʾ al-Naṣrī would make of it all. In the midst of his people’s tribulations—struggling to preserve the dignity of his people under the crushing weight of colonization and spiritual erasure—what would he say if he saw how his cry was repackaged? Would he applaud the promotion of this edition? Would he recognize his own voice in it? Would he see in these curated translations the desperate call to Allah that once poured from his heart like a flood against injustice?

Would he understand how it became a product—circulated, quoted, signed at conferences, and weaponized not for liberation, but for decorum?

And what would he say of the times we live in now, as the cries of Black people, Palestinians, Iranians, Rohingya, and so many others rise with a desperation sharper than anything I can remember? Would he hear echoes of his own voice in ours, or would the distortion be too great?

That is the question I carry. And this is an attempt to start answering.