There was no shade. No clouds visible in the sky. The hot sunlight sizzled on my skin and all the other 1.8 million pilgrims performing Hajj, the greater pilgrimage to Mecca.

And we were walking under the wide open sky on the plain of Arafat, thousands flocked on the wide road taking slowly but surely steps. And it was the day of Arafah, considered to be the most sacred day in the Islamic calendar.

But all I could remember that day was being drenched in sweat and sparingly taking sips of the little water I had left. Each step I took was a heavier step than the last and the feeling of exhaustion took over my body and there was nothing I could do. There was still a long, long way to walk.

And I was young. I had strength. I was 15 years old with probably the most stamina I’ll ever have. But I was at the edge of what I could take and all I could remember thinking was nothing but the heat on my skin and the dry throat from my thirst.

Then I looked beside me.

There was an old woman. She must have not been a day younger than 70; so old, so bent with age, that her back had folded permanently into ruku’ almost arched 90 degrees.

She was walking under that same sun with no one by her side, no shade, no water and with legs that had given out a long time ago.

And she wasn’t stopping. She wasn’t complaining. She wasn’t looking for somewhere to sit. She was moving towards God with whatever was left of her, even when staying still would have been easier.

The stark difference between those realities hit me. I was a teenager with strength in my legs and youth in my body… yet I was the one who had the audacity to complain? Audacity to feel tired when there were people around me walking with bodies that had given up physically before I was even born? Audhubillah.

That image of the old woman never left me throughout the rest of the pilgrimage. And later I came to understand what was carrying her was her himmah. Her resolve.

Some translate the word as ambition, or as willpower, or grit. But they all ultimately come to the same meaning. Himmah comes from the root verb hamma, which means to intend or set your mind on doing something. So this drive comes from something internal, making Himmah a faculty of the heart. It comes as an interior force that moves the body when the body has nothing left. However you may translate it, it was obvious that old woman’s heart was stronger than her legs. And that kind of resolve doesn’t spin out of nowhere but rather it comes out of the heart’s unyielding determination of love and submission to something greater than itself.

It is a sad and unfortunate reality—a crisis even amongst this generation (including myself), is most of what defeats us in this life doesn’t defeat body first. It defeats the heart. They lose the will to do something purely psychologically before the physical body has even felt its difficulty or pain. I know this because I felt it on that road, a fifteen-year-old with strength in his legs, ready to stop, while a woman almost 5 times my age kept walking. And there’s countless examples.

Students who give up on hard problems. The ones who lack the ambition to build something for themselves and instead spend their days rotting in bed. The ones who don’t go out into the world and help and be of service to the community and to the people. The person who gives up on a relationship before it has even taken fruit or taken the time to truly work on through it. The person who abandons the thing they promised they’d finish. The one who’s given up on prayers because they’re blinded to the fruitions of what has been given to them.

It’s the lack of himmah. And when the heart has truly decided to give up, the body follows.

I remember hearing this story from one of my teachers, Hamza Yusuf, recounting an incident that happened to him when traveling with Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. They were driving when they came across a car accident. A car flipped upside down and crushed, and a man trapped inside with blood everywhere, Indian music blasting from inside.

They stopped and got of the car to help, and Dr. Umar says to him: “Hamza, when I say pull him, pull him.”

Hamza Yusuf goes to the man, and he watches as Dr. Umar goes behind the car, and cries out “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greater) lifting the car up with his hands while Hamza Yusuf pulls the man out of the car, his whole robe completely soaked in blood. And the car was a Chevy Impala. Those cars aren’t light by any means.

This kind of strength does not come simply. It is the power of the human being which comes from an absolute trust in God which when in need, you trust God and he will instill in you the strength, the resolve to do what the body would physically not been able to do. And I believe the same spiritual resolve was instilled in that old woman on Arafat. The distance that old woman walked, the heavy car Dr. Umar lifted with his hands… that isn’t possible by the body alone. That comes from the soul. That comes by having spiritual resolve, himmah.

One of my favorite sayings from the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is when he said “the best of mankind are those who benefit mankind.”

He didn’t say those who benefit Muslims. But mankind. So it incumbent on each of us to go out into the world and build things, to serve, to see things through where the body would quit before the heart does. Because himmah isn't only the resolve to endure but also the resolve to be useful with whatever strength that endurance buys you. The old woman walked toward God; Dr. Umar lifted the car for a stranger - both were himmah made put to service.

On that plain of Arafat, everyone was in those same two white sheets of cloth. From the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the strong and then spent. Completely indistinguishable except with what was in their hearts.

And for good reason. Making coffee was part of my morning ritual, taking one cup when I woke up, one cup to campus, and a cup after I came home. I lived and breathed caffeine. I couldn’t stay awake in classes without it.

And I didn’t think much of it at all until it was only when a friend confronted me:

“You’re actually addicted. Really. You gotta stop.”

And I denied immediately without a second thought:

“I’m not addicted. There’s no way,”

But the words barely left my throat when I knew that was a lie.

So I gave it up the very night I was confronted. No gradual decrease - straight up full stop. I didn’t dare drink take a sip at all afterwards. I would refuse any sip of coffee to the point where my mother grew exasperated with this and tried to get me to drink a little bit again. But I was stubborn.

The first four days I had possibly the worst migraines I’ve ever had - and it was only worse because I was traveling that weekend to Pennsylvania studying anger, hatred, and envy (Book 24 of the Ihya by al-Ghazali) with Yahya Rhodus.

But it became easier over some days, weeks. I didn’t rely on it anymore. My body adjusted, slowly forsaking its dependency on the caffeine. In fact, I physically couldn’t sleep in classes anymore. The strangest contronym.

This contronym stuck. I’d set out to kill a craving and ended up somewhere stranger. Not just free of the coffee, but changed by the leaving of it. So what had I actually done? Broken a habit, sure. But a habit is only continuous behaviour whether good, bad, or somewhere in the nuanced middle, and “I stopped doing a thing” didn’t seem to cover it. Coffee itself was never the problem. The harm was in the excess, the daily dependence I couldn’t see until someone named it for me. So when I quit, I wasn’t really quitting coffee. I was trying to break the desire, the reflex that reached for a cup before I decided I wanted one.

But the question remains: is breaking the desire actually the goal?

Anyone can abstain. The recovering drinker who never touches a glass again has quit, the dieter who keeps no sweets in the house; but has he mastered it, or only fled it? There’s an old distinction in this, and I happened to be sitting inside it that very weekend.

That weekend I spent withdrawing, I was studying al-Ghazali’s Ihya, Book 24, on anger and envy. And the longer I sat with the text and hearing its commentary, the less trivial my caffeine headache felt, as much mundane this “addiction” in apparent looked. Al-Ghazali’s whole project is really all about riyada al-nafs, on disciplining the soul, and his claim isn’t the enemy to be killed but the raw material to be governed, as our desires are part of what makes us human. He famously says “Desires make slaves out of kings, and patience makes kings out of slaves.”

The key to this is in all in the heart. Not the heart as feeling, but the qalb. The organ of perception, the seat of the self, the thing that gets polished or rusted by whatever we indulge. Which means a coffee habit isn’t a different kind of thing from the vices al-Ghazali spends his life on but just a fainter instance of it. Desires are part of our heart, the center of all human behavior and al-Ghazali argues purifying it, or rather transforming it should be our primary focus in life.

It also reframes the goal. In the book on anger, al-Ghazali isn't trying to make you a person who never feels anger. That person would be a doormat and not a saint. He wants anger placed under the direction of intellect and religious guidance, available when it’s right and silent when it isn’t and it really requires understanding the desire’ nature to work on governing it.

We can apply the same framework here, as he’s arguing that the aim is to actually bring the appetite under the command of the will and not to simply kill it, so that the thing serves you instead of ruling you. Some desires you uproot. Others you learn to govern. Coffee, I decided, was the latter kind. If I could drink again and not have it collapse back into compulsion - a cup here, a cup there on my terms - then I’d truly have done something harder than quitting. I’d have mastered it.

…

It was now January 29, 2026 - 52 days had passed since I’ve tasted the bitterness of those Ethiopian beans. Grabbing a Pistachio latte for my mother at Summer Moon Coffee, I sat in the car staring at the cup, I decided to take a sip. Now I will say I did immediately choke and part of me was thinking it was divine intervention giving me a warning that this relapse-as-a-test could just be just rationalization, but the idea was to master my appetite and desire for the pungent flavor.

So now the question won't sit still. If I can master coffee, what else? Sweets that I shouldn’t be snacking on my diet. The phone, that's in my hand before I've decided to want it. It’s all the same reflex but in different appeareances. The list is long and most of it isn't about coffee at all.

To abstain from desires but to return and utilize them with the sole purpose of overcoming them (and not becoming a rationalization mechanism). To make the appetite serve rather than rule. It's a small thing, a cup of coffee. I find this to be one of the epitome of overcoming in the mastering of the self.