This essay is based on a contribution by Engin Karahan to the second plenary session of the International Council of Christians and Jews conference in Hanover on 13 July 2026. A German version is available here.
Interreligious audiences who ask about the Muslim view of repentance usually expect a single answer, although a map of positions would be more accurate. Muslim thought has never spoken with one voice on ritual, guilt, and restitution, and the way it has learned to handle that plurality is itself part of the answer.
A concept forged in dispute
Early Islamic theology coined the term Ehl-i Kıble, the people of the qibla (TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi)1. It covers all who turn towards the Kaaba in prayer and affirm the basic creed: the oneness of God, the prophethood of Muhammad, and the Qur’ān as revelation. Mainstream Sunni theology drew a far-reaching conclusion from it, formulated as early as Abū Ḥanīfa. Whoever belongs to the Ehl-i Kıble cannot be declared outside Islam (takfīr) for theological disagreement alone. Ash’arīs and Māturīdīs, Ḥanafīs, Shāfiʿīs, and Ḥanbalīs fell under this protection, and so did the Mu’tazila, whom their opponents called ahl al-bidʿa, people of innovation.
The concept is no record of peaceful pluralism, however. From the start, the history of Muslim thought was a history of contest between successive attempts to fix an orthodoxy and a heterodoxy that kept reasserting itself and in fact generated the diversity that later had to be managed. The Umayyad caliphate, the Abbasid miḥna under al-Maʾmūn, and the Seljuq institutionalisation of an Ash’arī mainstream were political projects of theological closure. Ehl-i Kıble is the procedure that survived, the de facto Sunni working compromise, because none of these closures finally succeeded, and its origin in conflict adds to its value.
Liturgy as work on the human being
A praxeological perspective helps to see what rituals do. Creeds, liturgies, and customs are sedimented practice, inscribed in bodies and dispositions, in what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus2. Such symbolic orders have to stay adequate to reality; they work like maps that make a real territory navigable. When map and territory drift apart, the result is hysteresis, a structural lag between inherited dispositions and changed conditions, which produces social pathology and individual suffering.
The word liturgy comes from the Greek laos and ergon, the work of or for the people. The double genitive is telling, since liturgy is work a community performs and at the same time work performed on it. The Islamic vocabulary holds a similar duality. ʿIbādah, from ʿabd, servant, names what the worshipper does, yet its theological grammar says the doing serves the worshipper and not God, who needs nothing. The Sufi tradition states openly that ritual is a technique by which the human being is reordered. To ask whether a liturgy is meaningful is therefore first to ask what it forms.
The theme of repentance, repair, and reconciliation translates into a dense Islamic semantic field. Tawba is repentance as reorientation, a directional image more than an affective one. Tezkiye is the labour on the self that the Qur’ān names as the purpose of prophetic mission (62:2). Iṣlāḥ is the repair of the soul, of broken relations, and of the social order. Ṣulḥ is the active making of peace, often as a distinct legal procedure. Holding these together is ʿibādah, worship in a sense far broader than ritual performance.
Six positions in the field
Muslim traditions answer the question of how ritual relates to repentance in different ways. Six positions can be distinguished by where they place the weight. Some stress the form of ritual or its ethical substance, others the inner labour of the self or the recovery of a past purity.
The Ash’arī and Ḥanbalī mainstream understands ʿibādah as a divinely instituted form whose validity rests on correct performance and sincere intention. Central to it is the taʿabbudī character of ritual, its meaning set by revelation and not derivable by reason. Repentance takes shape through ritual here, through the prayer of repentance (ṣalāt al-tawba), the night vigils of Ramadan, and the standing at ʿArafāt. The form itself carries the repair, because it reorders the human being through embodied submission. The position holds deep psychological insight and deserves to be taken seriously.
The Ḥanafī and Māturīdī tradition, the school of considered reasoning (ehl-i reʾy), keeps ritual essential but gives reason and ethical substance more room. In his Kitāb at-Tawḥīd, al-Māturīdī argues that the intellect can recognise basic moral truths before revelation reaches it. His epistemology contains a remarkable corollary. The natural state of the mind is the questioning one, and the whisper of Satan lies in the suggestion not to ask. A prayer performed alongside ongoing injustice remains valid as ritual but is incomplete as worship. Whoever has surrendered the capacity to question has given up something that makes worship a human act in the first place.
The Mu’tazila, historically marginalised and read again today, insists on divine justice (ʿadl), on the rational knowability of good and evil, and on human responsibility. The result is a strong reading of repentance as moral accountability. In his Mughnī, ʿAbd al-Jabbār makes restitution a structural duty. God does not forgive the rights of fellow creatures (ḥaqq al-ʿibād) until the wronged party has been made whole. Repair, on this view, is first of all ethical and concrete.
The Sufi tradition offers the psychologically densest Muslim account of the inner life. Its grammar of repair rests on a small set of precisely named disciplines. Muḥāsaba is the daily examination of conscience that does not wait for crisis, murāqaba vigilant self-observation, tezkiye and tarbiyah the gradual purification and education of the self under guidance, dhikr the recurring practice of remembrance. Repentance here is a graded path. The manuals distinguish the repentance of the ordinary believer, that of the seeker, and that of those who have already turned and must now turn from the subtle pride of having turned. No other Islamic tradition has described so finely how the self resists its own healing, the makr al-nafs. Yet it carries an ambivalence. A theology that reads every event as a manifestation of divine wisdom, suffering and injustice included, fosters inner resilience and can slide politically into quietism, a dignified acceptance of the status quo. It often answers brilliantly how a person becomes better, while the question of a more just society can remain open, a tension the tradition itself has recognised in its most reflective moments.
Contemporary neo-traditionalism is the new mainstream in many parts of the Muslim world and often goes unnoticed by non-Muslim observers, who tend to read Muslim plurality through the binary of liberal reformers against fundamentalists. It presents itself as the recovery of the classical schools against the rationalism of modern reformers. In practice it draws on a Ḥanbalī-Ash’arī synthesis with Salafi inflections and on the image of an unbroken tradition reaching back to the prophetic age. Three features stand out. Access to the Qur’ān and ḥadīth is to be mediated by the legal school, and direct engagement counts as error or innovation. The “tradition” invoked is, on closer inspection, often the late-classical literature of compendia and commentaries rather than the early sources. And its critique of modernity frequently borrows the vocabulary of critical theory without turning that lens on its own construction of tradition. Voices such as Wael Hallaq, with his work on the “impossible state”, or the perennialist school around Seyyed Hossein Nasr nonetheless raise serious questions about the conditions of moral life in late modernity. The broader movement, especially in the diaspora and online, builds a sealed ritual and theological biotope that few of its own adherents can actually inhabit.
The historical-critical voices of contemporary Turkish theology, Hayri Kırbaşoğlu, İlhami Güler, Mustafa Öztürk, and İsrafil Balcı, in different registers, share a sharp concern that ritual without ethics has, over long stretches of Muslim history, served as an anaesthetic. Balcı speaks of abdestli sahtekârlar, fraudsters in a state of ritual purity, whose ablutions are impeccable and whose dealings are corrupt. In continuity with the Qur’ānic prophets, they insist that a ritual which does not transform the practitioner has lost its function. The critique is in the text itself. Sura 107, al-Māʿūn, condemns those who pray while driving away the orphan and failing to feed the poor.
Beyond these six, Shia traditions read Karbalāʾ as a recurring liturgy of repentance and protest, classical Salafi reformism reads the same sources differently again, and feminist Muslim hermeneutics around Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Kecia Ali contests received readings of gender and ritual authority. The structural axis is nevertheless visible. Form and substance, inner labour and outer justice, recovery of the past and adequacy to the present cannot do without each other.
Can a community repent?
Repentance is usually thought of as an individual act. The Islamic answer to the question of communal repentance carries a complication that follows from Ehl-i Kıble itself. The procedure forbids the takfīr of a community as such. To mark a whole group as collectively in need of repentance is to exclude it, in effect, from the community of the faithful. Classical Sunni theology therefore knows no public day of repentance imposed by religious authority. The Friday sermon exhorts (waʿẓ) and calls to consciousness (tadhkīr), but it does not pronounce collective guilt.
There are, however, forms in which individual repentance takes on a communal body. The standing at ʿArafāt on the ninth of Dhū l-Ḥijja gathers two to three million simultaneous repentances in one place on one day, joined to a promise of comprehensive forgiveness. The form is communal, the moral grammar individual; each pilgrim stands alone before God. ʿĀshūrāʾ is observed differently in Sunni and Shia readings, in both as a liturgy of remembrance. The Sunni tradition recalls prophetic deliverances, above all the landing of Noah’s ark and the rescue of Moses and the Israelites from Pharaoh, while the Shia tradition mourns Karbalāʾ and the failure to protect the Prophet’s family. And collective istighfār, the asking of forgiveness in times of disaster, epidemic, and crisis, acknowledges that a community stands in need of mercy without confessing a specific guilt. None of these forms dissolves the individual into the collective. Repentance can thus find communal expression without becoming an instrument of group accusation.
When form and reality drift apart
Liturgies are techniques of habitus. They shape how one stands and breathes, what one notices, what one feels guilty about, and what one experiences as relief. They work as long as they remain adequate to the lived situation of those who practise them. In Muslim communities in Germany and beyond, a recurring hysteresis can be observed, a lag between inherited liturgical forms and the social, demographic, technological, and ecological reality in which Muslims now live.
As that lag widens, four pathologies appear. The first is ritualism without ethical traction; the form persists and no longer transforms. The second is ethical urgency without ritual grounding, a critique that is sharp but fails to reach the dispositions where change actually happens. The third is an inwardness detached from the social, which polishes the soul and leaves the world unaltered.
The fourth and currently most consequential is the artificial biotope. When a movement insists on a ritual and ethical form that presupposes a social and economic environment which no longer exists, and which the movement itself produces only as a managed enclave, its adherents are placed in lasting cognitive dissonance. The form requires conditions the world does not supply, and the world supplies conditions the form does not accept as legitimate. The believer is asked to live a right life in a wrong one. Only a small functional elite of community leaders, functionaries, and paid staff can carry this burden, because for them the biotope is institutionally subsidised. Ordinary adherents bear the dissonance in silence, often at considerable psychological and ethical cost. Seen from within the tradition, this is iṣlāḥ gone astray. The map is mistaken for the territory, and people are asked to repair themselves towards a map that matches no real territory.
What the four pathologies share is a broken relation between individual practice and communal life. The ritualist preserves the form privately while the community decays around them. The ethically urgent attack the community without letting their own demand remake them. The mystic withdraws into inner work while social bonds wither. The biotope recruits people into a community that cannot be lived. The classical sources never separated the individual and the communal; ḥaqq al-ʿibād, the rights of fellow creatures, places the community at the heart of the work of repentance. The Muslim voices worth listening to therefore ask which arrangement of inner labour, ritual form, and ethical-political engagement would be adequate to where Muslims actually live. The prophetic critique already contains this question, since it measures every practice by whether it repairs the self and the social fabric.
A procedure for the interreligious table
Ehl-i Kıble is, above all, a procedure. It expects believers to disagree theologically, sometimes profoundly, and for that reason refuses to expel them from the community of those who turn towards the same horizon. The procedure was developed for internal Muslim difference, but its structure reaches further.
Jewish and Christian traditions know related moves. The Talmud, on the dispute between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, records that “these and those are the words of the living God” (Eruvin 13b)3, and Christian theology distinguishes fundamentalia from adiaphora, the essential from matters on which believers may differ.
Each of these traditions also holds the tension that the Muslim case makes visible, between the discipline of the inner life and the demand for outer justice, between the form that carries and the substance that justifies the form, a tension that probably none of them has resolved. Across religious boundaries, repentance, repair, and reconciliation therefore depend less on identical liturgies or a shared theology than on a common orientation, the willingness to remain at the same table, and the discipline to refuse the exclusion of the other.
Footnotes
Yurdagür, Metin (1994): Ehl-i Kıble. In: TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 10, Istanbul, pp. 515–516. Online: https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/ehl-i-kible (accessed 25 September 2026).↩︎
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977): Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (French original 1972).↩︎
Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eruvin 13b. Online at Sefaria: https://www.sefaria.org/Eruvin.13b (accessed 25 September 2026).↩︎