Why Is My Dua Not Answered? The Traveller Whose Food Was Haram

Few questions are asked with more pain than this one: I have prayed, I have begged, I have raised my hands again and again — so why is my dua not answered? The Quran and the Sunnah give a number of windows into that question, and one of the most searching of them has nothing to do with the words of the prayer at all. It concerns the state of the person praying: what he eats, what he drinks, and what he wears.

In a single narration, the Prophet ﷺ first stated a principle about Allah Himself, then quoted the command Allah gave to the Messengers and to the believers alike, and then painted a picture no listener forgets — a traveller, worn out by a long journey, lifting dusty hands to the sky and crying out to his Lord, while everything that sustains him is unlawful. This article stays with that narration and with the verse it echoes, and lets them speak in their own words.

1. Allah Is Good, and He Accepts Only That Which Is Good

Abu Huraira reported that Allah’s Messenger ﷺ began with a statement about Allah before he said anything about us:

“O people, Allah is Good and He therefore, accepts only that which is good.” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

Everything in the narration grows out of this opening. Allah is Good, and what He accepts is what is good. The principle is stated as a fact about Allah’s own nature and acceptance, not as a threat. A deed, a gift, or a prayer that is offered to Him is received in keeping with what it is. When the Prophet ﷺ later describes a man whose supplication struggles to reach acceptance, the reason has already been given in this first sentence: the goodness of what is offered matters, because the One receiving it accepts only that which is good.

This is worth sitting with before we rush to the traveller. The hadith does not begin with the sinner; it begins with Allah. The door of the whole teaching is gratitude-inducing, not despairing — the Lord who is being asked is Himself perfectly good, and He has told us plainly what He loves to receive.

2. One Command for the Messengers and for the Believers

The Prophet ﷺ then showed that the demand for pure provision is not a burden laid on ordinary people alone. It is the very command Allah gave to His Messengers:

“And Allah commanded the believers as He commanded the Messengers by saying:” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

“O Messengers, eat of the good things, and do good deeds; verily I am aware of what you do” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

Those are Allah’s words to the Messengers, quoted inside the hadith from Surah Al-Mu’minun (23:51): eat of the good things, and do good deeds. Notice the order. Eating of the good things comes first, and righteous deeds follow it — as though the deeds grow out of the provision. The purest human beings who ever lived were not excused from watching what they ate; they were commanded to it, and their good deeds are mentioned in the same breath as their food.

Then the Prophet ﷺ quoted the matching command given to the believers, from Surah Al-Baqarah:

“O those who believe, eat of the good things that We gave you” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

The believers are addressed with the same words in substance as the Messengers. What reaches the table of a believer is therefore not a small, private matter beneath the notice of religion. It is the subject of a direct command from Allah — the same command He honoured His Messengers with.

3. The Verse Itself: Eat of the Good Things and Be Grateful

Here is that verse in the Quran’s own full wording, with its second half — gratitude — restored to view:

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ كُلُوا۟ مِن طَيِّبَـٰتِ مَا رَزَقْنَـٰكُمْ وَٱشْكُرُوا۟ لِلَّهِ إِن كُنتُمْ إِيَّاهُ تَعْبُدُونَ

“O you who believe, eat of the good things We have provided to you and be grateful to Allah, if it is He whom you worship (in real terms).” (Quran 2:172)

The verse ties three things together in one sentence: eating of the good things Allah has provided, gratitude to Allah, and the reality of worshipping Him. Eating lawfully is not presented as a dry legal exercise. It is gratitude in action — receiving provision from Allah’s hand, from the good things He provided, and thanking Him for it — and the verse makes it a test of whether our worship of Him is real. We have written elsewhere about gratitude (shukr) in Islam as a station of the heart; this verse shows gratitude sitting down at the table.

Note also whose provision it is: “the good things We have provided to you”. The lawful meal is a gift before it is an achievement. The believer who eats of the good things is not congratulating himself on his strictness; he is accepting Allah’s provision in the way Allah directed, and thanking Him for it.

4. The Traveller: A Dua That Looks Complete

Then the Prophet ﷺ turned from the command to a person:

“He then made a mention of a person who travels widely, his hair disheveled and covered with dust.” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

Consider what this man has going for him, outwardly. He is a traveller, far from home, worn down by the road — exactly the kind of person whose need is obvious and whose prayer a listener would expect heaven to answer. His appearance itself is an argument: dishevelled, dust-covered, with nothing between him and his Lord but his need.

And he prays the way anyone would hope to pray:

“He lifts his hand towards the sky (and thus makes the supplication):” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

“O Lord, O Lord,” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

His hands are raised. His voice is raised. He calls on Allah by His lordship, twice, with the urgency of a man who has nothing else. If answered prayer were a matter of outward form alone — of posture, volume, and visible desperation — this man’s dua would be the first in line. The Prophet ﷺ builds the scene deliberately, so that everything about the prayer looks right, before he shows us the one thing that is wrong.

For the earnestness of calling on Allah itself, compare the dua the Prophet ﷺ praised in another place — the dua of the oppressed, against which there is no barrier. Earnestness matters enormously in dua. This narration is about the one thing that can stand against even earnestness.

5. The Four Unlawful Things

Then comes the turn in the narration — a single sentence listing everything that sustains the man:

“whereas his diet is unlawful, his drink is unlawful, and his clothes are unlawful and his nourishment is unlawful” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

Four things are named. His diet — what he eats. His drink — what he drinks. His clothes — what covers him and meets the world. And his nourishment — the whole system by which he is fed and kept alive. Nothing about the phrase is narrow: it is not one forbidden bite on one bad day, but a life sustained, through and through, by what is unlawful. What goes into him is unlawful, what he wraps himself in is unlawful, and the source he draws his living from is unlawful.

This is why the narration reaches so much further than the dinner table. The traveller’s problem is not a recipe; it is a provision. His entire sustenance has been built on what Allah did not permit, and he carries that sustenance in his body as he lifts his hands. The hands are raised to heaven, but the body they belong to has been fed from below the line Allah drew.

The daily details of eating and drinking in the Sunnah — its courtesies, its blessings, its gratitude — are gathered in our guide to Islamic eating etiquettes. This narration stands behind all of them as their foundation: before the etiquette of the meal comes the lawfulness of the meal.

6. “How Can Then His Supplication Be Accepted?”

The narration ends not with a verdict but with a question:

“How can then his supplication be accepted?” (Sahih Muslim 1015 — Sahih)

The Prophet ﷺ leaves the sentence hanging as a question, and the question does the work. How can it? The man asks Allah for goodness while refusing the good things Allah provided and feeding instead on what Allah forbade. He wants acceptance from the One who “accepts only that which is good”, while the life he brings to the prayer is built on what is not good. The contradiction is the teaching.

We should state the lesson exactly as strongly as the text states it, and no more strongly. The narration presents unlawful provision as something that stands in the way of a dua’s acceptance — a barrier the worshipper himself carries into his prayer. It does not hand us a calculator for other people’s prayers, and it does not tell any sinner that his Lord has stopped listening to him altogether. It tells each of us where to look when our own hands feel heavy: not only at the words we are saying, but at the provision we are living on.

7. Examining Our Own Provision

The practical response this hadith asks for is an honest look at how we are sustained. That look has a few natural parts, all of them plain.

First, the source. Where does my living actually come from? The command in the verse is to eat of “the good things We have provided to you” — provision that comes from Allah by routes He is pleased with. A believer who wants his dua to travel upward begins by making sure his income and his food travel lawfully first.

Second, other people’s rights within that provision. Wealth can be earned in a lawful trade and still be tangled by what is withheld from those who have a claim on it. Clearing what we owe is part of purifying what we live on — we have written about the seriousness of debt in Islam, and it belongs in this examination too.

Third, gratitude for what is lawful. The verse joins eating of the good things to being “grateful to Allah”. A household that thanks Allah for a modest lawful meal is living this hadith from its bright side: provision received as a gift, eaten as a trust, and turned into strength for worship.

None of this requires despair over the past. It requires a decision about the present table and the present pay packet — to take, from today, from the good things Allah has provided.

8. The Door Is Not Closed

It would be a misreading of this narration to walk away from it in hopelessness. The same Prophet ﷺ who described the traveller is the one who taught us to keep asking, and the same verse that commands eating of the good things addresses us as believers whom Allah has provided for. The barrier the hadith names is a barrier a person can remove, because it is made of choices — of what to earn, what to buy, what to eat, and what to wear.

So the answer to “why is my dua not answered?” is not “stop asking”. It is: purify what you can purify, and keep the hands raised. Feed the body that prays from the good things Allah provided, thank Him for them, and then call on Him as the traveller called — but without the traveller’s burden. And while you ask for yourself, do not forget the asking that is done for others: making dua for others in Islam is among the most generously answered forms of supplication, and a heart busy with others is a heart already turned toward the good.

The traveller’s scene is a warning, but it is a warning with a map inside it. Allah is Good, and He accepts that which is good — so bring Him a life fed on good, and ask.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What reason does the Prophet ﷺ give for a dua not being answered?

In Sahih Muslim 1015, the Prophet ﷺ described a traveller who lifts his hands to the sky crying “O Lord, O Lord”, while “his diet is unlawful, his drink is unlawful, and his clothes are unlawful and his nourishment is unlawful”, and he asked: “How can then his supplication be accepted?” The narration presents unlawful provision — a life sustained by what Allah forbade — as a barrier standing in the way of a supplication’s acceptance.

2. What does “Allah is Good and He accepts only that which is good” mean?

It is the opening principle of the narration: “O people, Allah is Good and He therefore, accepts only that which is good” (Sahih Muslim 1015). Allah is perfectly good, and what He accepts from His servants is what is good. It is the reason the traveller’s state matters — he is asking for acceptance from the One who accepts only that which is good, while his nourishment is unlawful.

3. What command did Allah give to both the Messengers and the believers?

The same command in substance. To the Messengers He said: “O Messengers, eat of the good things, and do good deeds; verily I am aware of what you do”, and to the believers: “O those who believe, eat of the good things that We gave you” (both quoted in Sahih Muslim 1015). Eating of the good, lawful things is a command laid on the best of mankind and on the believers alike.

4. What does Quran 2:172 command the believers?

It commands: “O you who believe, eat of the good things We have provided to you and be grateful to Allah, if it is He whom you worship (in real terms).” (Quran 2:172). The verse joins lawful eating to gratitude and makes both a sign that a person’s worship of Allah is real.

5. If my provision has not been pure, should I stop making dua?

No text in this narration tells anyone to stop asking Allah. The hadith warns that unlawful nourishment stands in the way of acceptance, and the verse points to the remedy in the same breath: eat of “the good things We have provided to you” and “be grateful to Allah” (Quran 2:172). The response the texts point to is to purify one’s provision — and to keep the hands raised.