On my birthday, my friend Allen Arugay, godfather to our eldest, sent his greetings. After the courtesies, he asked a question, “Any birthday blues?”

“None so far,” I replied, “as I am able to hold it.”

Perhaps I spoke too soon.

The following day, while telling him how colleagues had marked the occasion, I could feel something creeping in. So I asked whether he ever had the blues on his birthday.

“My blues are of the good kind,” he said. “For me, birthdays are a way to refresh, restart, and continue to celebrate life.”

When I was younger, birthdays were easy. I looked forward to them, prepared for them, and attached aspirations to them. My first birthday was celebrated at home. My seventh was spent at the happy place under the double arches.

Celebrating birthdays was simply part of the family culture I grew up with. My mother was born and raised Catholic and embraced Islam after marrying my father. Some familiar customs naturally remained part of the home they built together.

My father was different. He joined our birthday dinners and, especially in his later years, seemed happy to use the occasion to indulge in a little of his favorites. But he himself appeared nonchalant about birthdays. I cannot say with certainty why.

Sometime in my early twenties, I was with my father and some of his friends when the subject casually came up. Islam gives Muslims two prescribed annual religious festivals: Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The conversation was brief, but the question it planted was not.

Was I supposed to be celebrating birthdays at all?

That question has never produced a simple answer for me. Muslim scholars do not speak with one voice on the matter. Some believe Muslims should avoid recurring birthday celebrations, pointing to the two Eids established in the Prophetic tradition.

Others distinguish religious observance from ordinary custom and allow birthdays when they are occasions for family, gratitude, or reflection, without being treated as something Islam prescribes.

Even the Prophet Muhammad’s birth enters the discussion. When asked about fasting on Mondays, he said it was the day on which he was born and revelation came to him. Scholars who permit birthdays cite this as an acknowledgment of birth through gratitude. Those who object point out that he did not establish an annual birthday celebration.

I am not qualified to settle that argument. I am still a struggling follower of Islam trying to understand how faith should shape ordinary life.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if my father’s quiet attitude came from a similar reservation. Or perhaps, compassionate as he was, he simply did not want whatever reservations he had to dampen the happiness of people he loved. I cannot know.

What I do know is that birthdays no longer mean to me what they did when I was seven, or even twenty.

Perhaps Allen gave me a useful way to think about them. Refresh. Restart. Continue.

The passing of another year need not merely be an occasion to count candles. It can also be a moment of muhasabah, of taking account: What did I do with the year that was given? What should I do differently with the next, if I am given one?

I may still not have completely settled what birthdays ought to mean to me. But I am grateful for another year, and deeply grateful to everyone who remembered, prayed, called, and sent a simple wish. I received them not as reasons to make much of the day, but as reminders of the people with whom this life is shared.

Perhaps that is enough for now: another chance to refresh, restart, and make better use of whatever time is still entrusted to us.

Alhamdulillah.