make me one who establishes the prayer, and [raise up] from my progeny [those who do the same]. Our Lord, accept my supplication. Our Lord, forgive me, my parents, and the believers on the Day the Reckoning is set up.⦗1⦘

And He says, speaking through Moses (peace be upon him): “He said, ‘My Lord, expand my breast for me, make my task easy for me, and loosen a knot from my tongue so that they may understand my speech…’”⦗2⦘

The Almighty also says: “And those who say, ‘Our Lord, avert from us the punishment of Hell; indeed, its punishment is inescapable…’”⦗3⦘

—and so on with the other noble Qur’anic supplications. Some of them Allah, exalted is He, teaches us to recite directly, while others He recounts from certain prophets and messengers or from some of His servants and friends. Plainly, not one of them contains that innovated form of tawassul around which the zealots keep revolving and over which the dissenters quarrel.

When we turn to the noble Sunnah to examine the Prophet’s ﷺ supplications—those Allah approved for him, taught him, and pointed us to their virtue and beauty—we find them in complete harmony with the earlier Qur’anic prayers in that they, too, are utterly free of the innovated tawassul just mentioned. Here are a few of those selected prophetic invocations:

One is the well-known supplication of istikhara, which the Prophet ﷺ used to teach his Companions whenever they intended a matter, just as he would teach them a chapter of the Qur’an. It is:

“O Allah, I seek the better choice from You by virtue of Your knowledge; I seek power from You by virtue of Your might; and I ask You from Your tremendous bounty. You have power and I have none; You know and I do not; and You are the Knower of the unseen. O Allah, if You know…”