The Paradox of Excellence: When Your Best Work Serves the Worst Ends

"Cooperate with one another in goodness and righteousness, and do not cooperate in sin and transgression. And be mindful of Allah. Surely Allah is severe in punishment."
— Qur'an, Surah al-Ma'idah (5:2)

There is a hadith that every Muslim professional in the West has heard. It is quoted at career panels, invoked in Friday khutbahs, and plastered across motivational Instagram graphics: "Indeed Allah loves that when one of you does something, he does it with itqan." The narration, reported by al-Tabarani and graded sahih by al-Albani, is almost always deployed in the same direction — as a divine mandate to be excellent at your job. Work hard. Climb the ladder. Outperform your colleagues. Show them what a Muslim looks like. Be the best software engineer, the best accountant, the best analyst your firm has ever seen.

And there is truth in this. The related — and more firmly authenticated — hadith from Shaddad bin Aws in Sahih Muslim carries even greater weight: "Verily Allah has prescribed ihsan upon everything." The scholars of usul al-fiqh noted that the word kataba ("prescribed" or "written") implies obligation. Ihsan is not optional. We are commanded to pursue excellence in all that we do.

But a question lingers — one that the motivational speakers rarely pause long enough to consider: excellent for whom?

The Unexamined Assumption

The entire itqan-at-work narrative rests on an assumption so deeply embedded that most of us have never stopped to examine it: that the work itself is directed toward something good, or at least neutral. That your excellence serves, or at minimum does not undermine, the wellbeing of the ummah and of humanity at large.

In a Muslim polity — in a society governed by the shari'ah, where the economy, the military, and the institutions of state answer to a framework rooted in divine guidance — this assumption holds. A Muslim rocket scientist contributing to the defense capabilities of a Muslim nation is participating in the protection of Muslim lives. A Muslim physician serving in a public health system oriented toward the welfare of its citizens is fulfilling a communal obligation. A Muslim teacher shaping the next generation within a curriculum that does not contradict the fundamentals of her deen is doing work that is unambiguously praiseworthy.

But what happens when the same skills, the same drive, the same itqan, are deployed within a system whose outputs are directed against the very people you are commanded by Allah to protect?

The Sharpest End of the Spectrum

Consider the Muslim engineer who works for Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor on earth, with $64.7 billion in defense revenue in 2024. Or RTX — formerly Raytheon Technologies — the company behind the Patriot missile system, pulling in $40.6 billion. Or Boeing, whose defense segment generated $32.7 billion that same year, and which holds a $7.48 billion contract for JDAM tail kits — the guidance systems that turn ordinary bombs into precision munitions. Between 2020 and 2024, just these five firms — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — received $771 billion in Pentagon contracts. That is one-third of the $2.4 trillion the Pentagon spent on private contractors over the same period.

These are not abstract numbers. They are the financial architecture of a war machine that has, over two decades, operated almost exclusively in Muslim-majority countries. Brown University's Costs of War Project — the most comprehensive public accounting of the post-9/11 wars — estimates that at least 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. When you account for the indirect deaths caused by the destruction of healthcare systems, economies, water infrastructure, and food supply chains, the total rises to an estimated 4.5 to 4.7 million people. Thirty-eight million have been displaced.

The overwhelming majority of these dead, maimed, and displaced are Muslim.

For the Muslim engineer at Lockheed or Raytheon, the itqan question takes on a sickening irony. The better you are at your job, the more efficiently the missile finds its target. The more precise your guidance system, the more "successful" the strike. Your excellence is not incidental to the killing — it is instrumental to it.

This is the sharpest end of the spectrum, and it is not a hypothetical. There are Muslims working in the American defense industry right now. Some of them heard that hadith about itqan and felt it applied to them.

But It Does Not End at Defense

Here is where the discomfort deepens — because you do not need to work at Raytheon for your labor to feed the machine. You just need to have a job. Any job.

In 2024, the average American income taxpayer contributed approximately $3,707 toward weapons and war — encompassing the Pentagon, weapons contractors, military operations, and military aid to foreign governments. National defense accounted for roughly 13% of the total federal budget, consuming $919.2 billion in fiscal year 2025. In fiscal year 2026, that number has crossed the $1 trillion threshold for the first time. Of the $82.3 billion in foreign aid the US disbursed in fiscal year 2024, Israel received $6.82 billion — the single largest recipient — with approximately one-third of all foreign aid going to military purposes.

Every paycheck, then, is a tithe to the war machine. You cannot opt out. Your withholding does not come with a checkbox that says "not for bombs." The IRS does not offer a conscientious objector rate. Whether you are a software developer in Virginia, a nurse in Michigan, or a grocery clerk in Texas, a portion of your labor — converted into dollars, extracted by the state, and allocated by Congress — ends up purchasing the very weapons that are used on your brothers and sisters.

And so the Muslim professional in the West faces a grim arithmetic: every raise, every promotion, every year of career growth means a larger tax contribution, which means more dollars flowing to defense, which means — at some fractional, statistical level — more Muslim death.

What does itqan mean in this context? What does it mean to strive for excellence when the system you are excelling within takes a cut of your productivity and uses it to fund operations in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Gaza?

The Contrast That Haunts

The cruelty of this paradox becomes clearest when you hold it up against what should be.

Iran's ballistic missile program — now the largest indigenous missile arsenal in the Middle East — was born out of a wound. During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on Iranian cities, and Tehran had no means to respond. The experience of the "War of the Cities" taught the Islamic Republic a lesson that it has never forgotten: you can rely on no one but yourself for defense. The United Nations did not protect Iran. The international community did not intervene. And so Iran set about building its own deterrent, from scratch, under crippling sanctions and with no access to the global arms market.

The engineers, physicists, and rocket scientists who built that program — who mastered solid-fuel propulsion, who designed the Fateh and Sejjil and Shahab systems, who hollowed out mountains to build underground missile cities — used their expertise in the direct service of their people's survival. Their itqan has a clear and immediate moral vector. The better the missile, the stronger the deterrent. The stronger the deterrent, the fewer Iranian lives lost to foreign aggression. Their excellence protects.

Now consider the Muslim-American engineer whose technical skills are comparable. Perhaps she studied at the same caliber of university. Perhaps her knowledge of guidance systems or propulsion is just as deep. But the vector of her labor points in the opposite direction. Her itqan does not protect — it threatens. Not because she chose this, not because she wills it, but because the system within which she works has its own logic, its own priorities, and its own targets.

The same expertise, the same striving, the same excellence — and yet the moral outcomes could not be more different.

What Are We Really Being Told?

Return, then, to the motivational speaker at the Muslim professional conference. He is on stage, slides behind him, energy high. He quotes the itqan hadith. He tells you that Islam commands excellence. He tells you that your work ethic is da'wah. He tells you that when your non-Muslim colleagues see your dedication, they see Islam.

Is he wrong?

Not entirely. The principle is real. Islam does command ihsan. The Prophet ﷺ did teach that Allah loves excellence. This is not in dispute.

But is the full picture being drawn? Is anyone asking what happens when the framework within which you are being "excellent" is one that structurally works against the ummah? Is the speaker accounting for the fact that the economy these Muslims are excelling in is underwritten by the largest military budget on earth — a military budget that, in the post-9/11 era, has been overwhelmingly deployed against Muslim populations?

Or is the itqan narrative, as it is commonly preached in the West, simply a baptism of the status quo — a way of making Muslims feel spiritually at peace with a situation that should, by every Islamic metric, disturb them deeply?

This is not a fatwa. This is not a declaration that working in the West is haram, or that one should quit one's job, or that every Muslim must make hijrah tomorrow. The fiqh of necessity, the fiqh of residing in non-Muslim lands, the principle of individual versus collective responsibility — these are all real and weighty considerations that scholars have debated for centuries.

But the motivational industry that has grown up around Muslim professional life in the West is not engaging with any of this. It is offering comfort where there should be at least some discomfort. It is quoting hadith in a vacuum, stripped of the moral context that gives those hadith their meaning.

Sitting With the Wound

The scholars of usul have always understood that the permissibility of an action is inseparable from its context. Itqan in a halal enterprise is praiseworthy. Itqan in a haram enterprise is not. And between the two lies a vast grey space — the space where most Muslims in the West actually live — where the work itself may be permissible but the system it feeds is not.

There is no clean answer here, and this article will not pretend to offer one. To wrap this up with five bullet points of "practical steps" would be dishonest. The wound is real. The complicity — however indirect, however involuntary — is structural.

What can be said is this: a Muslim who feels the weight of this contradiction is not suffering from a lack of faith or motivation. That weight is the sound of a functioning conscience. The discomfort you feel when you look at your pay stub and calculate what fraction went to the Pentagon — that is not weakness. That is your fitrah doing what it was designed to do.

And perhaps — perhaps — the first step is simply to stop pretending it is not there. To stop letting motivational speakers and career coaches and LinkedIn Muslims inoculate you against a discomfort that is, at its root, deeply Islamic. The Qur'an does not tell us to be comfortable. It tells us to be conscious.

"O you who have believed, fear Allah. And let every soul look to what it has put forth for tomorrow. And fear Allah. Indeed, Allah is Acquainted with what you do."
— Qur'an, Surah al-Hashr (59:18)

Sources

1. Al-Tabarani, al-Mu'jam al-Awsat. Hadith: "Indeed Allah loves that when one of you does something, he does it with itqan (excellence)." Graded sahih by al-Albani in Silsilah al-Sahihah.

2. Sahih Muslim, Hadith of Shaddad bin Aws (Nawawi's Forty, #17): "Verily Allah has prescribed ihsan (excellence) upon everything."

3. Qur'an, 5:2 (Surah al-Ma'idah). "Cooperate with one another in goodness and righteousness, and do not cooperate in sin and transgression."

4. Qur'an, 59:18 (Surah al-Hashr). "O you who have believed, fear Allah. And let every soul look to what it has put forth for tomorrow."

5. Ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Qur'an al-Azim, commentary on 5:2. Allah commands believers to help one another in performing righteous deeds and forbids them from helping one another in sin and the commission of prohibitions.

6. USAFacts, "US Defense and Foreign Affairs Fact Sheet: State of the Union 2026." In FY 2025, the US spent approximately $919.2 billion on national defense, accounting for 13% of the federal budget. https://usafacts.org/reports/state-of-the-union/defense/

7. Arms Control Association, "U.S. Defense Spending Rises by More Than 17 Percent" (March 2026). FY2026 discretionary defense spending reached $1.05 trillion. https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2026-03/news/us-defense-spending-rises-more-17-percent

8. National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, "2025 Tax Day Receipt" (April 2025). In 2024, the average American taxpayer contributed $3,707 toward weapons and war. https://ips-dc.org/release-2025-tax-day-receipt/

9. Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, "Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020–2024." From 2020 to 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to five firms: Lockheed Martin ($313B), RTX ($145B), General Dynamics ($116B), Boeing ($115B), and Northrop Grumman ($81B). https://quincyinst.org/research/profits-of-war-top-beneficiaries-of-pentagon-spending-2020-2024/

10. US Funds, "The Top 10 U.S. Aerospace and Defense Contractors." Lockheed Martin: $64.7B defense revenue; RTX: $40.6B; Northrop Grumman: $35.2B; Boeing: $32.7B (2024 data). https://www.usfunds.com/resource/the-top-10-u-s-aerospace-and-defense-contractors/

11. Brown University, Costs of War Project, "Human Costs." An estimated 940,000+ people killed by direct post-9/11 war violence (2001–2023), including 432,000+ civilians. Total deaths including indirect causes estimated at 4.5–4.7 million. 38 million displaced. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human

12. Brown University, Costs of War Project, "U.S. Federal Budget." The US has spent approximately $8 trillion on post-9/11 wars. US military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023 totals $21.7 billion. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/economic/us-federal-budget

13. Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, "Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?" Defense spending in 2024 was $872 billion, approximately 13% of total federal spending. https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go

14. Wilson Center, "Ballistic Missiles in Iran's Military Thinking." Iran's adoption of ballistic missiles was driven by the Iran-Iraq War experience and the lesson that a strong retaliatory capability was vital for deterring aggression, requiring maximum independence from foreign suppliers. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/ballistic-missiles-irans-military-thinking

15. Brookings Institution, "Constraining Iran's Missile Capabilities." Iran's missile force performs five key roles including deterring aggression and offsetting conventional military inferiority caused by international sanctions. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/FP_20190321_missile_program_WEB.pdf