Journal Entry II — On Lā ilāha illa’Llāh, the hidden gods of a grown man, and the humiliating work of Tawḥīd
By Ibrahim Dimson
I have been saying Lā ilāha illa’Llāh for most of my life.
There is no god but Allah.
I have said it loudly.
I have whispered it.
I have said it in mosques.
I have said it in prison.
I have said it in Senegal.
I have said it in America.
I have said it in Ghana.
I have said it when I was afraid.
I have said it when I needed something.
I have said it when somebody died.
I have said it when something I prayed for finally happened.
I have sat in the Wird and repeated it until the words no longer felt like words.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Again.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Again.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
There is no god but Allah.
Simple.
Absolute.
The foundation of everything.
And for a long time, I thought I understood what I was saying.
Of course there is no god but Allah.
I am a Muslim.
I do not bow to statues.
I do not pray to idols.
I do not believe that money created me.
I do not believe that powerful men control the universe.
I do not believe that a woman can give me life or death.
I do not believe my businesses determine my destiny.
I know Allah is Allah.
I know.
That was never the problem.
The problem came when life began introducing me to all the things I said were not my gods—
and I started noticing how much power I had given them anyway.
---
The Qur’an says something frightening about a man who takes his own desire as his god.
For years I read verses like that and imagined somebody else.
Some reckless person.
Some unbeliever.
Some man who wakes up every morning determined to follow his appetites.
I did not imagine Ibrahim.
That is one of the dangers of Scripture.
You can become so accustomed to reading it that you stop allowing it to read you.
I had to get older before I understood that an idol does not always ask you to bow.
Sometimes it only asks you to obey.
Sometimes it asks you to fear it more than you fear disappointing Allah.
Sometimes it asks you to love it so much that losing it feels like the end of the world.
Sometimes it asks you to compromise one principle.
Just one.
Just this time.
Sometimes it simply whispers:
You cannot survive without me.
And that may be where the idol begins.
---
I know what it is like to have to survive.
That matters.
I came home from prison to a world that loves redemption stories more than it loves redeemed people.
America will put a former prisoner on television and applaud his transformation.
But ask him to fill out an application.
Ask him to rent something.
Ask him to borrow money.
Ask him to walk into certain rooms with his record attached to his name.
Then watch how quickly society remembers what it supposedly forgave.
So I became an entrepreneur partly because I am an entrepreneur.
But I also became one because survival has a way of making entrepreneurship less romantic.
There were doors that were not going to open for me.
So I learned to build doors.
And then I learned to build rooms behind the doors.
Then businesses.
Then projects.
Then bigger ideas.
Eventually people begin calling you a businessman.
A founder.
An executive.
A leader.
They see the suit.
They see the company.
They see the travel.
They see the projects.
They see whatever success you have been able to scrape together from years of refusing to die quietly.
What they may not see is the scared man underneath some of that ambition who still remembers what it feels like when the system has decided what kind of man you are allowed to become.
That fear can build things.
It can make you relentless.
It can make you work while other people sleep.
It can teach you how to create opportunity where none exists.
But fear makes a terrible god.
And somewhere along the road I began having to ask myself:
Am I building because Allah gave me something to build?
Or am I building because some frightened part of Ibrahim still believes that if he stops producing, he disappears?
That question hurts.
Because sometimes I do not know the answer.
---
I have worshipped being needed.
Not literally.
I need to say that clearly because Tawḥīd is too serious for sloppy language.
I have never believed another person or created thing possesses divinity alongside Allah.
When I speak here of the things I “worship,” I am speaking about the false sovereignties of the heart—the things I have sometimes obeyed, feared, desired, protected, or depended upon in ways that exposed how incomplete my lived Tawḥīd remained.
And one of those things has been being needed.
There is a strange intoxication in becoming the person people call when something goes wrong.
The fixer.
The one with an idea.
The one who knows somebody.
The one who can make the call.
The one who will figure it out.
Family needs something.
Business needs something.
Community needs something.
A friend has a crisis.
Somebody has a project.
Somebody has a problem.
Somebody needs money.
Somebody needs an introduction.
Somebody needs you to solve a situation they helped create.
And there you are.
Again.
Ibrahim will handle it.
At first this feels like service.
Sometimes it is service.
But the nafs is clever enough to hide inside good deeds.
Eventually you have to ask whether you enjoy helping people—
or whether you enjoy being the person without whom they believe help cannot come.
Those are not the same thing.
The first points toward Allah.
The second quietly builds a throne.
And if I become angry when somebody no longer needs me, what exactly was I serving?
Them?
Allah?
Or myself?
---
I have worshipped being right.
This may be one of my oldest idols.
I can argue.
Anybody who knows me knows this.
Give me enough time and I can construct the case.
Facts.
Chronology.
Context.
Intent.
Precedent.
Exhibits A through Z.
I can explain why I did what I did, why the other person misunderstood it, why their reaction was unreasonable, why my decision made sense under the circumstances and why, if everyone would just stop being emotional for five minutes, the jury would clearly return the proper verdict.
There is only one problem.
Sometimes Allah does not care about winning the argument I am trying to win.
Sometimes the truth is not that I was completely wrong.
Sometimes the truth is worse.
I was right and still behaved badly.
That one is hard for me.
Because being factually correct can become one of the most elegant hiding places for an undisciplined ego.
I can be right about what happened and wrong about how I spoke.
Right about the money and wrong about the mercy.
Right about somebody’s behavior and wrong about what I allowed their behavior to produce inside me.
Right about the principle and still secretly enjoying the punishment.
And Tawḥīd asks something more frightening than:
Who was right?
It asks:
Who was your Lord while you were being right?
---
I have worshipped control.
This one may be the hardest.
Entrepreneurship trains you to anticipate.
What happens if this fails?
What happens if he does not deliver?
What happens if the funding does not come?
What happens if the client changes his mind?
What happens if the government changes the rules?
What happens if the deal collapses?
What happens if the person I trusted turns out not to be trustworthy?
You learn to build contingencies.
Backup plans.
Alternative structures.
You learn to think three moves ahead.
That is responsible.
Until responsibility quietly becomes the delusion that enough planning can eliminate dependence upon Allah.
I have said tawakkaltu ʿalā’Llāh while internally maintaining seventeen backup plans just in case Allah's decree does not go the way Ibrahim prefers.
That sentence embarrasses me.
But it is true.
There is something almost comical about a human being who cannot guarantee that his heart will still be beating tonight trying desperately to control next year.
And I know this.
Intellectually.
Spiritually.
I have heard the lessons.
I know tawakkul.
I know qadar.
I know that what Allah has written for me will reach me and what He has not written will not become mine because I sent twenty more emails.
I know.
Then a deal starts falling apart.
And suddenly Ibrahim discovers how advanced his theology actually is.
---
I have worshipped money.
Again—not by believing money is divine.
But perhaps the Prophet ﷺ chose his language carefully when he warned about the slave of the dinar and the dirham: the person whose satisfaction rises when he is given and collapses when he is denied. The narration is in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī.
That hadith hits differently when you have known both having and not having.
Money is easy to romanticize when you have never needed it.
Try having children.
Try having a wife.
Try having employees.
Try having an elderly mother.
Try having people whose problems sometimes arrive at your doorstep carrying numbers attached to them.
Try building businesses in places where one delayed payment can move through an organization like a sickness.
Money is real.
Bills are real.
School fees are real.
Payroll is real.
Medical expenses are real.
Debt is real.
You cannot pay electricity with a spiritual metaphor.
So I will never pretend money does not matter.
But precisely because it matters, it becomes dangerous.
Because gradually “I need money to fulfill my responsibilities” can become “I need this particular money.”
Then:
“I need this particular deal.”
Then:
“I need this particular person to say yes.”
Then:
“If this doesn't happen, I don't know what I am going to do.”
And somewhere between responsibility and panic, a servant of Allah begins behaving like a servant of the outcome.
I have been there.
I may be there again.
That is why I need Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Not because I have forgotten Allah exists.
Because I sometimes forget money does not.
Not in the way Allah does.
Money comes.
Money goes.
Businesses rise.
Businesses fail.
Currencies fall.
Partners change.
Markets change.
Governments change.
People make promises on Monday and develop amnesia by Thursday.
Allah remains.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
---
I have worshipped reputation.
That is an ugly one.
Especially when you have a past.
A man with a past develops a complicated relationship with the present.
You want people to know you are not who you were.
You want your children to know.
Your community.
Your business associates.
People who Google your name.
People who heard something.
People who remember something.
People who only know a chapter and assume they know the whole book.
So you begin protecting the new man.
The legitimate businessman.
The Muslim.
The father.
The husband.
The community person.
The man sitting near people he once could not have imagined meeting.
And because that newer life cost so much to build, criticism can feel like somebody trying to drag you backward.
Maybe that is why certain accusations hit me harder than they should.
Maybe I am not only defending the truth.
Maybe I am defending the distance I have traveled.
But even redemption can become an idol if I need people to acknowledge it before I can have peace.
That is another brutal lesson.
Allah can forgive you while people continue discussing you.
Allah can elevate you while somebody still remembers your lowest moment.
Allah can know who you have become while someone insists on speaking only about who you were.
And if my peace requires unanimous public agreement about Ibrahim Dimson, I am going to die exhausted.
Because there will always be somebody who does not understand.
Somebody who heard another version.
Somebody who simply does not like me.
Somebody who thinks my ambition is arrogance.
Somebody who thinks my religion is performance.
Somebody who thinks my business is something other than what it is.
Somebody who will never give me the verdict I want.
What am I going to do?
Spend the rest of my life appealing their decision?
At some point Lā ilāha illa’Llāh has to mean:
Their opinion is not my Lord either.
---
I have worshipped family.
This is where language becomes especially delicate.
Because I love my family.
Deeply.
My children are not idols.
My wife is not an idol.
My mother is not an idol.
My siblings are not idols.
Islam commands love, care, responsibility, mercy and kinship.
But the Qur’an itself names fathers, children, siblings, spouses, relatives, acquired wealth, commerce whose decline we fear, and homes we love—and warns against allowing any of these to become more beloved than Allah and His Messenger ﷺ.
Allah did not list only wicked things.
That is what gets me.
He listed beautiful things.
Family.
Home.
Livelihood.
The things a respectable man is supposed to love.
Apparently the greatest competition for Allah in a religious man's heart may not always be something obviously sinful.
Sometimes it is something good that has been loved out of order.
I am a father.
That identity can consume you.
You want to protect your children from everything.
Their mistakes.
Their disappointments.
The consequences of their choices.
The world.
Sometimes themselves.
But eventually Tawḥīd has to remind a father of something painful:
I am responsible for them.
I am not their Lord.
I cannot write their futures.
I cannot prevent every heartbreak.
I cannot force guidance into a heart.
I cannot bargain with Allah to guarantee that their lives will unfold according to the screenplay their father has written.
That is terrifying.
Especially for a man who likes control.
The same is true with an elderly mother.
There comes a point where the woman whose presence felt permanent begins making you conscious of time.
You notice age.
You notice fragility.
You start noticing moments you once assumed would always be available.
And somewhere beneath your duʿāʾ is the knowledge that everyone belongs to Allah.
We say:
Innā lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn.
We belong to Allah and to Him we return.
Not only when somebody dies.
That was true yesterday.
It is true while they are sitting beside us.
It is true while we are still laughing.
That may be the hardest Tawḥīd of love:
To love somebody completely without secretly demanding that Allah let you keep them forever.
---
I have worshipped my Shaykhs in another subtler way—not by believing anything remotely divine about them. That would violate everything they taught.
The danger is different.
It is possible to love righteous people so much that you become more interested in your proximity to them than your transformation through them.
I know the names.
I know the lineage.
I know where I have sat.
I know whom I have known.
I had Shaykh Hassan Cissé in my life.
After his passing, Allah placed me under the guidance of his brother, Imam Shaykh Tijani Cissé.
Those are immense mercies.
But being near a physician does not make a sick man healthy if he refuses the medicine.
There is a difference between saying:
That is my Shaykh.
And allowing the Shaykh to disturb the parts of you that desperately need a Shaykh.
A Ṭarīqa can become identity.
Tarbiya is when it becomes surgery.
And Tarqiya cannot mean much if the same Ibrahim keeps protecting every disease that the Path is trying to expose.
I have had to learn that honoring my Shaykh cannot merely mean defending him, praising him, visiting him or telling people my relationship to him.
It must eventually mean becoming easier to correct.
Otherwise I may have turned even spiritual affiliation into another way of decorating myself.
That thought frightens me more than criticism ever could.
---
And then there is the oldest idol.
The one hidden behind almost all the others.
Me.
Ibrahim.
My wants.
My fears.
My story.
My reputation.
My wounds.
My plans.
My need to explain.
My version of events.
My understanding of fairness.
My timetable.
My children.
My businesses.
My money.
My future.
My spiritual progress.
Even my repentance somehow finds a way to contain the word my.
Maybe that is why Lā ilāha illa’Llāh begins with a destruction.
Lā ilāha.
No god.
Before affirmation comes negation.
No.
Not this.
Not that.
Not money.
Not people.
Not power.
Not approval.
Not fear.
Not appetite.
Not status.
Not control.
Not Ibrahim.
Illā’Llāh.
Except Allah.
The sentence clears the room.
Then leaves One.
---
There is something severe about the Tijānī Wird when I think about it this way.
I sit there repeating the tahlīl.
One hundred times.
But perhaps the point is not simply that my tongue produces one hundred correct theological statements.
Maybe each Lā ilāha illa’Llāh is supposed to strike something.
One against fear.
One against pride.
One against money.
One against lust.
One against reputation.
One against anger.
One against the desperate need to control tomorrow.
One against being admired.
One against being needed.
One against the idea that some human being holds my destiny.
Again.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Something falls.
Again.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Something else.
Maybe this is why Tawḥīd is not elementary.
We teach it to children first because it is the beginning.
Then some of us spend the rest of our lives discovering that it is also the end.
---
The Qur’an says believers are stronger in their love for Allah.
I used to read “love of Allah” and think primarily about emotion.
Now I think love may reveal itself most clearly in preference.
When Allah's command and my desire separate, which direction does Ibrahim walk?
When my business interest says one thing and Allah says another?
When my pride says one thing and Allah says another?
When my fear says:
Protect yourself.
And Allah says:
Trust Me.
When my anger says:
Punish them.
And Allah opens the possibility of forgiveness.
When my ego says:
You need everyone to understand.
And Allah is sufficient as Witness.
When I am terrified that some door closing will destroy everything I have built—
what does Lā ilāha illa’Llāh mean then?
That is where Tawḥīd stops being theology.
That is where Tawḥīd becomes expensive.
---
The saints made it sound simple.
Allah.
That is all.
Not because life is simple.
Because they had become simple.
We are complicated because we have so many masters.
Money wants something from us.
Family wants something.
Business wants something.
Desire wants something.
Reputation wants something.
Fear wants something.
The past wants something.
The future wants something.
The ego wants everything.
Then we wonder why we are exhausted.
Maybe I am tired because I have been trying to serve too many masters while insisting I have only One.
---
I am not writing this from some station of completed Tawḥīd.
That would be absurd.
I am writing because I have begun recognizing the idols faster.
That may be progress.
I still get afraid.
I still calculate.
I still worry about money.
I still want to be understood.
I still hate losing control.
I still find myself caring too much about how certain people perceive me.
I still have ambitions so large that sometimes I have to inspect them carefully to determine whether they are service or ego wearing African-development language.
I still want my children protected.
My mother here.
My family healthy.
My businesses successful.
My plans fulfilled.
I still want things.
Islam never told me to stop wanting.
But the Path keeps asking me a different question:
What happens when Allah says no?
Can He still be Allah to me when the answer is no?
When the business fails?
When the person leaves?
When the money does not come?
When someone I love dies?
When somebody misunderstands me and I cannot correct the record?
When the plan I was certain was good collapses?
When my Shaykh tells me something my ego does not enjoy?
When my children choose differently than I hoped?
When life refuses to obey Ibrahim?
Can I still say—
not merely with my tongue, but with the surrendered part of my heart:
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh?
---
Maybe that is what I have been learning since prison.
Prison taught me that men can take your freedom.
Life taught me there are worse prisons.
You can walk through airports with a passport in your pocket and still be imprisoned by reputation.
You can own businesses and be imprisoned by money.
You can lead people and be imprisoned by their approval.
You can have a family and be imprisoned by your fear of losing them.
You can have a Shaykh and be imprisoned by an ego too proud to be trained.
You can repeat Lā ilāha illa’Llāh a hundred times every morning and evening and still spend the hours between those recitations discovering what the words have not yet conquered.
Perhaps that is Tarbiya.
Not mystical fireworks.
Not becoming impressive.
Allah exposing one false master after another.
Sometimes gently.
Sometimes brutally.
Until the servant finally recognizes the pattern.
---
I used to think Lā ilāha illa’Llāh was primarily something I was telling the world.
There is no god but Allah.
Now I think much of the time I am saying it to myself.
Ibrahim:
That man cannot save you.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
That deal cannot save you.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
That woman cannot save you.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Your children cannot complete you.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Your reputation cannot resurrect you.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Your businesses cannot guarantee tomorrow.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Your intelligence cannot outmaneuver Qadar.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
Your Shaykh can guide you, teach you, love you, discipline you and point you toward Allah—
but even he is pointing.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
And Ibrahim—
you cannot save yourself.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
---
Maybe one day I will say it and there will be less competition inside me.
Maybe that is Tarqiya.
Not that I become something.
That all the things I thought I was become smaller.
Until Allah becomes greater in my heart than the things that once terrified me.
Greater than prison.
Greater than my past.
Greater than poverty.
Greater than success.
Greater than failure.
Greater than people's praise.
Greater than their condemnation.
Greater than what I possess.
Greater than what I lose.
Greater than Ibrahim.
And perhaps that is why the sentence never gets old.
I thought I had understood it when I first became Muslim.
I am beginning to suspect I will still be learning it when I die.
So I will continue saying it.
In the Wird.
On airplanes.
Before meetings.
After disappointments.
When money is tight.
When money is abundant.
When I am praised.
When I am humiliated.
When a plan succeeds.
When Allah burns one of my plans to the ground.
When fear begins exaggerating the importance of another human being.
When my ego begins building another throne.
I will say it until the words begin dismantling the man who says them.
Lā ilāha illa’Llāh.
There is no god but Allah.
And perhaps the great humiliation of my spiritual life is discovering how many times I have had to say it because some part of me still believes otherwise.
Not in creed.
In conduct.
Not in ʿaqīda.
In attachment.
Not with my forehead.
With my fear.
With my obedience.
With my desperation.
With my heart.
So this is no longer merely my declaration of faith.
It is my daily eviction notice to everything inside Ibrahim that keeps trying to become lord.
Money.
Fear.
Reputation.
Control.
Desire.
Family.
Ambition.
The past.
The future.
Myself.
Out.
Lā ilāha.
None of you is God.
None of you owns me.
None of you writes my provision.
None of you determines my worth.
None of you controls my ending.
None of you has the right to sit where only Allah belongs.
And after everything false has been told to leave, there remains the only truth strong enough to carry the weight of my entire life:
Illā’Llāh.
Except Allah.
Salaamualaikum.
