Bismillah hirrahmaan nirraheem
Shaykh Kamaluddin DB:
In ramadhan Allah swt gave us a new heart, a new spiritual heart. “la allakum tattaquun” Allah swt gave us a heart with taqwa, and the same way when transplanting a new physical heart into a person the first 72 hours are vital to see whether the body will accept this new heart. The same way with our spiritual heart, the first 72 hours were vital to see whether our new spiritual heart could fit in to our surroundings, whether it would fit into our life or if we would need to put back our old heart. Subhanallah. It doesn’t take long, it takes the first week, for some people the first few days for them to lose this spiritual heart. 30 days of effort, 30 days of fasting all day and praying to Allah swt, crying at night, so much effort, so how can we lose all this?!
When a person has a physical illness, they will reach out to a doctor. One physical weakness is a lack of energy, to feel lazy, sleeping a lot. This physical laziness disturbs them so much that they even go to a doctor for it. So how important is it that a person with a lazy nafs, a person who doesn’t feel like reading Quran after ramadhan, a person with this laziness in deen should go to a shaykh? People will go to a doctor and say they have a lack of physical appetite, this will be such that it won’t make them suffer from complete hunger, they won’t be ill but yet they notice this slight change in appetite and they go to see a doctor. But what about the loss of appetite for tahajjud? For salah? For dua? What about loss of appetite for any form of ibadah, this is a complete loss of appetite. So this also needs curing!
The more intelligent and fortunate a person is in dunya, the more scared they should be. As all this will not come with you in the grave; your PHD, degree, education etc won’t be raised with you on the day of judgement, you will simply be raised as an insaan. The only thing there will be is a book; and this book will only scream how close you were to Allah swt, how much you remembered Allah swt. You don’t want to be there on that day with a book that shows how you forgot Allah swt, how you forgot his remembrance and how you left ibadah. Allahuakbar.
There is one mistake we should never make. And this is the mistake to be overly content with whatever level of Deen you have. You shouldn’t congratulate yourself on whatever state you are in. The same way in dunya you push yourself for a better status, education and job, this same attitude needs to be applied in deen. We need to excel in the pursuit of deen. We need excellence in taqwa, akhlaaq, salaah, in all aspects of deen!
Once a person was worried about his father who doesn’t pray his salaah. But this same father would say with such pride that I have worked for 30 years and I have never missed a day of work! Subhanallah! Even though this is okay and completely halal in deen to do, but just look at how this same person has missed so many salah. He is proud of this accomplishment in dunya but he is making such a spiritual loss in deen.
Sometimes we get delusions of grandeur, and that is why deen teaches us humility. Sometimes you need someone in your life, a humble person to address you and take you down a notch or two. There are too many people who will praise you and compliment you, there are too many of these people, but we need to have someone to make us realise where we are lacking in deen. We are so busy being fulfilled with dunya and creation that we no longer feel the need to be fulfilled by deen. This fulfilment of dunya leaves us neglectful of the need for the fulfilment of deen.
We don’t even have the desire to do such things in order to feel deeply in love with the Quran or the sunnah of rasoolullah saw. We don’t feel the need to pray tahajjud or to sit with the ulema. The reason we don’t feel this need is because we’ve chosen a life in which we gain all our fulfilment from the dunya, but this is a delusion! How can we be so fulfilled by dunya and the relationship with our creator is unfulfilled. And until we have someone to make us realise this delusion and deception we are in, no matter how fulfilled we are in dunya, we need to work on how fulfilled we are in deen; in terms of sabr, yaqeen, tawakkul, ibadah, aklaaq, are we fulfilled in these areas? Are we of benefit to others? Ask yourself am I able to help others, and support them with their deen? We can often provide so many people help with aspects of dunya, but we have not yet learnt how to help people with deen.
A person may come to a doctor on the day of judgement and say to him “Doctor, you cured me of this physical illness which I had, but you were muslim, you had knowledge of the Quran, you knew I had this spiritual illness and you never cured me of that!” People will come up to you in this way on the day of judgement, so when will we reach out and help people? When will we help them work on their ruuh?
The beauty and ease of deen is such that an education/profession can be paralleled with deen, and the way this works is that alongside the aspect on dunya, you also have to pursue the excellence in deen, so you also work hard on your aakihira. This is what is called a balance. To do this, we need to make sacrifices. We did this in ramadhan! In ramadhan we trimmed the dunya, we didn’t waste time socialising, we spent more time doing ibadah, and this was a training to teach us that we can live without these extras.
The beauty of deen is such that when you become a person of taqwa, haya, you become a person that safeguards your gaze, you pray tahajjud, you learn quran and hadith, and you explore this, this deen will affect your dunya and Allah swt puts barakah in your dunya. So whatever job etc you have, Allah swt puts barakah into it. Ontop of that, Allah swt also puts barakah in your relationships, and thirdly Allah swt puts barakah in your khidmat. So whatever you could do for others in your own ability before, now Allah swt opens doors to make this khidmat full of barakah. And there is a huge difference between the khidmat we can do with our own ability and the one in what Allah swt puts his barakah into and makes possible.
We should strive to want every single thing in deen, we shouldn’t even want one thing of deen to not be there due to dunya. But this takes desire, motivation, a vision and striving to be like this. In ramadhan, we became like this for a month. We stopped other things and we did more ibadah, the masjids were full with people. Everyone was doing all they could in order to not be left behind; we were all engaging in tahajjud, men came for jamat and some even sat in itikaaf! The doctors were doing the same acts as the ulema, subhanallah. This shows how much Allah swt has given us all this motivation and drive.
The same vision we use towards the pursuit of dunya, if we put this vision into deen we could get so far! So many people come to sheikhs with the problems of the dunya, but so little people come with problems in deen; so little people come with the problems that they want more taqwa, haya, they want closeness to Allah swt. We need to want these things and we need to make dua for these things.
“There is no harm in pushing ourselves in deen” You can’t get degrees and educational achievements without sacrifice and pushing ourselves, so why can’t we do this for deen?
Depending on the spiritual problem you have; envy, lust etc, we need to work hard to read material to change this, we need to work hard towards taubah. The next thing is tazkiyah; we need to purify our heart of these spiritual illnesses to purify ourselves.
This purification is done by 1) Feelings (love for Allah swt, fear of Allah swt, love for nabi saw, feelings of tawakkul, wilayah, trust in Allah , do this by being with people who have these feelings. We can get all these feelings from being with those who have these feelings. Be with the the tawwabeen, siddeqeen, qashieen; all of these people Allah swt mentions in the Quran, Allah swt mentions them because they are present). The second thing is to practice; 2) Ibadah, so to do lots of ibadah, and the more ibadah you do the more closer you can get to Allah swt. The first thing in ibadah is the quality of it, so we need to improve the quality of our salah. We need to convert our salah into dhikr. We pray salah five times a day, so if those five times a day we strive and struggle to remember Allah swt more in salah, 5 times a day every day , in a few weeks inshaallah this will help make us closer to Allah swt. We need to improve our concentration in salah, to forget dunya completely in our salah. This means to not remember anything other than Allah, even the halal is ghairAllah whilst in salaah.
The second quality is that of our masnoon duas. We need to recite them with feelings. So with the dua before eating we need to feel that with praying this dua, Allah swt is sprinkling baraqah on the food. These are the feelings nabi saw had in his heart when he made these duas. So the sunnah dua is not just complete with the sunnah language, but its complete with the sunnah feelings!
Another is to recite Quran every day. The Quran is a shifaa for the spiritual heart, the daily tonic for spiritual shifaa. Here, even if the quantity is less if you may be busy, the quality should still be there. (Although you can never be too busy to not even read the Quran at all in one day, even if this means a few rukus. Some people will even pick up a call from an unknown number out of ‘curiosity’ , this shows just how much time people have).
Imam Abu Hanifa (RA) says that the bare minimum right of the Quran on the believers is that every day they should open the Quran and cast a look of love on the Quran. This is the bare minimum right.
The next is to recite salawaat upon rasoolullah saw every day, even just 100 times takes about 10 minutes. This reminds us of our identity, I am not just a human being, I am an ummati of nabi saw, he is MY nabi, I am HIS ummati, I am the Ummah of the prophet saw. Every day we need to think of rasoolullah saw and recite durood shareef.
Istigfarr – To repent and make up with Allah swt. We deliberately sin purposefully against our creator, we need to fix this.
Muraqabah – To remember Allah swt in such a way that you forget everything else and only remember Allah. Because we don’t have this feeling in Salah, we need to practice this outside salah. The heart is silently reciting Allahs name. Why? When we make this intention, Allah swt says in Quran “you make dhikr of me, I make dhikr of you” so when you sit with this intention Allah swt makes dhikr of your heart, Allah starts to purify your heart, he starts to fill your heart with the love of Allah. The noor of Allah enters your heart.
Wuquf-e-qalbi – to always have an awareness, thoughts and feelings for Allah swt. Never allow your heart to be completely away from the remembrance of Allah. Allah swt said in the Quran “And don’t you ever ever let yourself be of those people whose hearts are empty of the remembrance of Allah swt” so we need to make an intention for our heart to always be remembering Allah swt.
May Allah swt make us spiritual human beings, and put the noor of his love in our hearts, ameen.
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