April 2013
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Seven Rights of the Prophet ﷺ
To travel through any Muslim land is to see tall, graceful towers – minarets – studded across the landscape from which, five times a day, the muezzin punctuates communal life by calling believers to prayer (salat). This stark, yet simple call serves to remind the community that in their day to day life – with its… Continue reading
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The Five Degrees of Prayer
In the following extract taken from his monograph explaining the virtues and merits of dhikr – God’s remembrance and invocation, Imam Ibn al-Qayyim (d.751H/1350CE) takes us through the ascending degrees of prayer (salat): ♦ ‘With respect to prayer (salat), people are of five levels: The first [degree] is of he who wrongs his own soul… Continue reading
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Is Islam Rational or Does It Stifle Rationality?
Are all religions (and thus, Islam) irrational? Does the Qur’an seek to stifle the human intellect? How reasonable is it to insist that Islam is against reason? And perhaps just as importantly, what do we mean by the words “intellect” or “reason”? The Qur’anic term used for “intellect” or “reason” is ‘aql. In his Dictionary… Continue reading
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Loving Allah & Islam is Far More Than a Bumper Sticker
Faith (iman) isn’t just an empty verbal affirmation or assertion of the shahadah. One must also surrender wholeheartedly: Do people imagine that they will be left alone because they say: ‘We believe,’ and that they won’t be tried? [Q.29:1] By the same token, it isn’t enough merely to say ‘I believe in Allah and His Prophet.’… Continue reading
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Hanbali Essentials: Purification
What follows is a presentation of the basic essentials of Hanbali fiqh. Rather than use any one text, I have distilled these rulings from four relied-upon (mu’tamad) primers in the school: Ibn Qudamah’s ‘Umdat al-Fiqh; Ibn Balban’s Akhsar al-Mukhtasarat; al-Qudumi’s al-Ajwibat al-Jaliyyah and al-Hajjawi’s Zad al-Mustaqni‘. The plan, God-willing, is to serialise these fiqh essentials over the coming weeks and months; commencing with purification. ♦ OUTLINE: Purification is… Continue reading
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Better the Devil You Know than the Devil You Don’t
‘It is a pity,’ argued Gai Eaton, ‘that so few people believe any longer in shaytan, the devil, if not in a personalised form, at least as an influence or a tendency. We need to be able to identify evil, not only when it manifests itself in genocide or torture, but in its roots and… Continue reading
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Takfir: Its Dangers & Rules
Takfir – accusing a fellow Muslim of apostasy; of having left the fold of Islam and being a disbeliever (kafir) – is indeed a grave affair in Islam. It is a fitnah, or “sedition,” whose flames were historically put out by the defeat of the Kharijites (khawarij), only to be set alight again in our times, on a global scale,… Continue reading