Dua when entering a town

When. On arriving at a city you are entering for the first time — at the edge of it, before going in. Travellers say it as the skyline comes into view.

The words. The address is unusually long before any request is made: Rabbas-samawatis-sab'i wa ma azlaln — "Lord of the seven heavens and all they overshadow". Azlalna comes from zill, shade: the heavens are described as casting shade over everything beneath them. A whole cosmology is invoked, and then the request is about one town. The disproportion is the point.

Qaryah in classical Arabic means a settlement of any size, not the small village the modern word suggests — it covers the city you are walking into.

The symmetry. Good is asked for twice — the good of the place and the good of its people — and refuge is sought from its evil once. A town is not treated as neutral ground. It has an effect, and so do the people in it, and the two are named separately because they are not the same thing.

What kind of fear this is. The supplication is not about danger in the dramatic sense. Arriving somewhere unknown, a person has no idea what the place will ask of them: which habits it will loosen, whom they will meet, what they will become there. The request covers all of that without specifying any of it.

A companion practice. Longer versions of this supplication continue with a request for provision from the town and protection from its afflictions. Saying the shorter opening does not leave the request incomplete.