More than merely an event, a becoming holds something unpredictable, unplanned—something not experienced as routine. Every perfect prayer is not a repeat of the previous one. Every devout prayer is not a rote phrase. It is a metamorphosis: there, something ‘becomes’.

Prayer is not a request for something: it is the expression of a mode of being, Henry Corbin says in his famous study of the sufism of Ibnu ‘Ara