Dua for forgiveness of all sins

When. It belongs to prostration, the position in which a person is lowest and closest, and it is also said outside prayer — in the last part of the night, after a wrong that will not leave the mind, at any moment when the general request for forgiveness feels too vague to mean anything.

The words. Dhanbi kullah — my sin, all of it — comes first, and everything after it is commentary. Diqqahu wa jillah: diqq is what is fine and minute, the thing too small to have registered; jill is what is gross and weighty. Awwalahu wa akhirah, its first and its last. 'Alaniyatahu wa sirrah, its open and its hidden.

Why itemise after saying "all." Because nobody says "all" and means all. A person praying for forgiveness has a mental list, and the list is short, recent and shameful — the things he already regrets. The three pairs go after everything the list omits: the small sins never noticed because they were small, the old ones no longer remembered, and the ones no witness ever saw. Each pair is a merism, two poles named to seize the whole span between them, and each closes a different escape route.

The third pair is the sharpest. Sirr is the secret one — not hidden from others but the sin whose whole existence is private, which nobody would ever raise with you, and which therefore never comes under any social pressure to be repented of. Naming it aloud in prayer is the only occasion it gets named at all.

No conditions in it. It does not grade sins by type or plead circumstances. It asks for the whole record, in one sentence, and the structure is what keeps the asking from being a formality.