Pleased with Allah as Lord

When. Morning and evening, among the fixed daily remembrances. It is also the sentence people return to after a decision goes against them, though it was never meant only for those moments — said on an ordinary morning it costs nothing, and that is precisely what makes it available on the hard evening.

The words. Raditu is past tense: "I have become pleased," not "I will try to be." Arabic reaches for the perfect tense when a state is to be presented as settled rather than aspired to. The root r-d-y also gives ridwan, and it carries acceptance without grievance — not resignation, which is a shrug, but consent. Then three nouns in the accusative: Rabba, dina, nabiyya. This is the accusative of specification, the Arabic way of saying "in the capacity of." Not "I am pleased with Allah," which would be a compliment paid upward, but "I am pleased with Allah as Lord" — pleased with the arrangement in which He commands and I do not.

Why three, and why these three. Lord, religion, prophet: the object of worship, the path to it, the one through whom the path came. Between them they exhaust what a person can be asked to have settled, and the three are famously the substance of the questions put in the grave. Saying them daily is rehearsal.

The hardest word. Radi is harder than amantu, I have believed. Belief can coexist with resentment about how things went. Contentment cannot. This supplication asks for the second, in the morning, before the day has given any reason for it.