For the past two weeks I’ve been missing the Fajr (aka Subh) prayers because my Nokia’s alarm wasn’t waking me up anymore. But two days ago I read something that inspired me to fix the problem right away. I was reading a collection of the khutbas that my shaykh, may Allah preserve him and give him good health, gave more than 15 years ago as an imam in the Sudan, and he was talking about how important time was. Here is what inspired me,

“The day in the life of the individual and the ummah is a precious treasure with which you could progress steps and steps, and it is a sort of treason toward Allah and His messenger for it to be wasted without expending energy in it supporting a force, doing something required of you, offering a service, acquiring knowledge, or doubling productivity….

And Islam encourages starting one’s work early, and that the Muslim seizes his day with a leap of determination, and that is why the Fajr prayer is the beginning of the Muslim’s day.”

How true: Time wasted is treason to Allah and His messenger! I had never thought of it that way! Instead of working for the betterment of the ummah, which requires of all of us to do our best, I sleep! And so within 24 hours my problem of waking up for Fajr has been solved! Here’s how:

The body takes its cues for sleeping and waking up from sunlight. As the sky gradually brightens, the body realizes that it’s time to wake up, and as the sky dims, the body starts to get sleepy. Now when I lived in Canada for a couple years, I bought this small side lamp that had a timer on it: you tell it when to wake you up, so it starts to gradually increase in light until the desired time (when it can also ring an alarm to make sure you wake up). And you tell it when you want to sleep, so half an hour before that it starts to dim slowly. By mimicking the sun, it was meant to help you wake up and sleep better, and in a more natural way, than from alarm clocks. But that lamp was too weak.

Here in Jordan I had to buy a normal light and then hook it up to a timer. I installed a pair of neon light tubes above my bed, and then installed an industrial timer that companies might use to control when their lights/electricity turn on or off. Both were pretty cheap. There’s no dimming or gradual lighting effect, but that’s ok. I set it up to turn on every morning at 5 then turn off again one hour later. It’s much easier to program than the digital timer that was on my side lamp because you just push down the pins for the hours you want it to be on. I also have it turn on again at 8 in the morning for another half hour, just in case I fell back asleep after Subh prayer.

This makes it MUCH easier for your body to wake up. If it doesn’t wake you up by itself, then it will make the alarm wake you up easier. And once you’re up it will make it really hard for you to try to fall back asleep without praying (astaghfirullah).

So there you go, problem solved. I hope writing this will help someone else out there wake up on the right time.

The next step is to change the light bulbs in my room and get the really bright energy-saving ones. This is because the body also gets its cue of how long it has been awake from the amount of light that it takes in. If you stay indoors with dim lighting, the body never gets enough lighting to say to the body: you’ve had a full day out working and now you should sleep. So you don’t get sleepy until very late and don’t have a good deep sleep. If your indoor environment is very brightly lit, your body takes in a lot of light, and at the end of the day it’s ready for a good long deep refreshing sleep.