Last year I wrote a blog piece, entitled Practical Steps for Learning Fiqh (which may be read here). This piece, I suppose, is a follow-up to it. In his advice to those seeking the "Key to the Saintly Path" (miftah tariq al-awliya), the venerable Hanbali scholar and spiritual master, Shaykh Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Wasiti wrote about one…
The Signs of Bliss & Misery
Some people are catapulted into the limelight; some have a quiet greatness thrust on them; most, though, live simple, ordinary lives. The ordinary believer believes in God and realises he is here through God's purpose, love and compassion. So he lives each day as God's blessing and acknowledges what he has he owes to God…
Dhikr Repetition: Is it Allowed?
In his al-Fawa'id (a patchwork-like book on moral psychology, that contains within it a collage of spiritual benefits and lessons on practical piety), Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah wrote: 'God, Exalted is He, says: And remember Job, when he cried unto his Lord: "Affliction has seized me. But You are the Most Merciful of the merciful." [21:83] This supplication…
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…
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…