THE QUR’AN says: Whoever does righteousness, be they male or female, and has faith, We will cause them to live a goodly life. [Q.16:97] The ‘goodly life,’ explained by the great sages and scholars of Islam to mean a life of inner contentment and happiness, is profoundly tied to doing righteous deeds, and doing them well. In other words, in Islam, the goodly life is connected to the godly life.
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TRUE SEEKERS of Allah and the Afterlife must realise that not leaving alone what doesn’t concern them will adversely effect the heart. In this context, words and deeds that are in obedience to Allah illuminate hearts; those that are merely licit (mubah) harden hearts; those that are sinful darken hearts.
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DOES THE QUR’AN ever speak of a collective calamity to a people, except that among its crucial wisdoms is to steer people away from their waywardness, sins and rebelliousness against God’s ways? So while we fulfil social distancing from others, let’s ensure we carry out spiritual distancing from sins too.
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HIGHER THAN GIVING our children our unconditional love which, of course, we must do, is to pray we can love them for God’s sake for the faith and righteousness they hopefully live by.
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TRULY BENEFICIAL KNOWLEDGE should nurture four qualities in a person: piety (taqwa) towards God, humility (tawadu’) towards others, detachment (zuhd) from wordliness, and spiritual striving (mujahadah) against one’s ego.
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SPIRITUAL MASTERS TEACH US that, after fulfilling the obligatory acts, the heart is best illuminated by three matters: [i] Reciting the Qur’an in a slow and measured tone, while pondering its meanings. [ii] Remembering Allah with proper decorum and with presence of heart. [iii] Spending part of the night standing in prayer, with reverence, humility and neediness.
Three things help such spiritual practices: [i] Not eating to one’s fill, but eating such that hunger is satiated. [ii] Keeping good spiritual company, not spending too much time with those who are heedless of Allah; whose main focus is on worldly stuff. [iii] Leaving those things that do not aid our spiritual growth, nor help us to fulfil our worldly duties or our earthly responsibilities.
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THE SOUL’S TRUE PURIFICATION is not possible without training ourselves to be sturdy during manifestations of the jalal.
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‘IF YOU FEEL the yearning for God it is inevitable that your style of life will change.’ – Sh. Abdal Hakim Murad, Contentions, 9/20
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IF RELIGIOUS faith and practice is to survive the constant onslaught of what is essentially an atheistic, secular monoculture, we Muslims will have to be, if not scholars, then at the very least people who study their religion and who think intelligently about it.
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‘WE COME INTO this world as Allah’s servants; let’s not leave this world except as Allah’s beloved friends.’ – Sh. Jaleel Ahmad Akhoon