The Divine does not play favourites, the devil does

There is a type of gratitude that has become a form of ego management. You can recognize it by its grammar as “I’m God’s favourite”, “I’m divinely protected and your life will fall apart when you wrong me”. God chose me, God favoured me – as if the blessing were a verdict on your worth as much as a it was test of it.

When we tell ourselves that our existence and provisions were favoured in relation to others, exceptional in relation to others, that Allah has arbitrary “favourites”, two things are being missed:

The first: your positioning didn’t happen by accident, but it solely didn’t happen because of you. Rizq – provision, circumstance, station – is distributed by Allah, not earned through deserving. The one who arrived before you didn’t outwork divine will. Neither did you.

The second, and harder one to swallow: Allah’s favour is not a zero-sum resource that runs out before it reaches people you’ve decided are beneath it.

Al-Razzāq provides for the oppressor and the oppressed. Al-Wadūd extends love to those you’ve written off. Allah does not operate on your grudges, your feuds, social hierarchies, or your very sincere belief that the people who wronged you are outside the reach of His mercy.

Gratitude is supposed to ground us to our origin – to the One who gave us life. It is not a conviction that your blessings make you among ‘a selected few’. When it produces the latter, you haven’t thanked Allah. You’ve used His name to congratulate yourself.

A lot of what naturally passes as gratitude is just strong attachment to our blessings. You can be grateful for everything you have, and still be defining yourself by it. Still measuring your worth through how favoured you are against all odds, still needing the blessing present to feel the peace. But if it were taken from you just as quickly as it came – by the same source that gave it – and you would not know who you are without it, then what you had was not gratitude. It was attachment to the gift – not to Allah, but to the higher version of yourself that the gift confirmed.

The perceived ‘chosenness’ you extracted from your blessings made your significance feel permanent. Immortal in the face of rejection.

You were grateful for what you had, not for Who gave it. The distinction only becomes visible when it’s gone. What you mistook for spiritual orientation was revealed to be materialism.

Gratitude does not require a blessing to be omnipresent in order to stay grounded in the One who gives abundance in the first place. Real gratitude is when you are also resilient without it.

We practice gratitude by multiplying all our reasons, through the accumulation of blessings that 1 in 100 people may not have. But when you understand that Allah shares His generosity with everyone, you see that He actually provides for us all the same.

When His Oneness is all we have and all we need – His provision equally reaches everyone, without exception, without hierarchy.

On mistaking positioning for cosmic preference

And underneath the exceptionalism is usually the language of “luck” and “privilege” – the secular version of the same error. It just removes the Divine from the equation instead of weaponizing Him.

The popularization of “geographical luck” is the most telling example. It is used to relativize our geospatial positioning in forced displacement, migration patterns, and birthplace – as though these were draws from a cosmic lottery rather than historical consequences of deliberate social systems. The framing of “luck” here flattens structural violence into chance, and in doing so, protects the architecture of that violence from ever being named.

This has extended into, (what I’ve noticed) a sedated, subcategory of gratitude that has developed in the West – a comfort with comfort, as though inherited ease were simply fortune. But Western conditions are not the product of ingenuity or virtue. They are the sediment of centuries of extraction. Everything consumed, rested on, inherited – it was taken from somewhere. Your comfort just made into the cover story.

You are never spectating other people’s hardships from a safe distance. It could always be you. You are currently paying with cognitive dissonance and atrophied empathy – and to even call that “privilege” is almost too much credit for one person.

“Privilege” is used to do the same heavy lifting as “luck”: but both are extremely insufficient as existential or social markers, because nothing about anyone’s positioning arrived by accident.

Yes, “luck” and “privilege” in their original use case are more than just neutral observations. But their oversimplification is how the history beneath every surface of life, avoids being traced back to its point of origin.

Your luckiness assumes a “lottery” in statistical probability, but it is nothing more than a personal narrative. And exceptionalism – spiritual or secular – is what keeps you from asking who paid for it.

Fortune is a fallacy you tell yourself

Spiritual exceptionalism and secular “luck” are structurally identical beliefs, even used in cahoots with each other when the complexities of spiritual and social life are not fully understood as something born with purpose and intention.

Both frameworks – the “I’m God’s favourite” crowd and the “I’m so lucky” crowd – are doing the same thing: treating their circumstances as a reflection of a chosen standing. One attributes it to divine preference, the other to cosmic randomness. Neither is asking the harder question, but both elongate the ego.

In most theology, “luck” doesn’t exist. Not because the world is predictable, but because nothing is random. Every door that opened, every door that closed, every delay, every acceleration – it is qadar. Decree. Not fortune or chance.

This matters because “luck” creates a fallacy where you are the protagonist of a universe that happened to arrange itself around your success. It’s humility-coded but it’s still centred on you – your timing, your circumstances, your particular good fortune. It still implies that someone else was unlucky and they had to be the reference point of your potential. That some people just draw the short straw. That the distribution of ease and hardship is arbitrary.

Qadar refuses that. It says the person you envy for their ease is also being tested. It says the person you pity for their hardship was also not forgotten; that one day they will also meet their glory, justice, and riches. It removes the moral hierarchy that luck subtly seeks to indoctrinate in us – the idea that provisional outcomes signal something about the person receiving them.

You are not lucky, you are positioned – precisely, intentionally, by Al-’Mubdi, the Originator – for a purpose that has nothing to do with your ego and everything to do with your accountability. The difference between gratitude and exceptionalism is whether the blessing points back to your Creator – or back to you.

Divine protection and providence may come through prayer and petition, but not through preference.

Your mercy is sought, not selected.