Soul Talk

The salat punctuates man’s daily existence, determines its rhythm, provides a refuge in the storm of life and protects man from sin.


The function of religion is to bestow order upon human life and to establish an “outward” harmony upon whose basis man can return inwardly to his origin by means of the journey towards the “interior” direction. This universal function is especially true of Islam, this last religion of humanity, which is at once a divine injunction to establish order in human society and within the human soul and at the same time to make possible the interior life, to prepare the soul to return unto its Lord and enter the Paradise which is none other than the Divine Beatitude. God is at once the First (al-awwal) and the Last (al-akhir), the Outward (al-zahir) and the Inward (al-batin).  By function of His outwardness, He creates a world of separation and otherness and through His inwardness He brings men back to their origin.


Religion is the means whereby this journey is made possible, and it recapitulates in its structure the creation itself which issues from God and returns unto Him. Religion consists of a dimension which is outward and another which, upon the basis of this outwardness, leads to the inward. These dimensions of the Islamic revelation are called the Shariah (the Sacred Law), the Tariqah (the Path) and the Haqiqah (the Truth), or from another point of view they correspond to Islam, Iman, and Ihsan, or “surrender”, “faith” and “virtue”. 


Although the whole of the Quranic revelation is called “Islam”, from the perspective in question, here it can be said that not all those who follow the tradition on the level of Islam are mu’mins, namely those who possess iman, nor do all those who are mu’mins possess ihsan, which is at once virtue and beauty and by function of which man is able to penetrate into the inner meaning of religion. The Islamic revelation is meant for all human beings destined to follow this tradition. But not all men are meant to follow the interior path. It is enough for a man to have lived according to the Shariah and to surrender (Islam) to the Divine Will, to die in grace and to enter into Paradise. But there are those who yearn for the Divine here and now, and whose love for God and propensity for the contemplation of the Divine Realities (al-haqaiq) compel them to seek the path of inwardness. The revelation also provides a path for such men, for men who through their iman and ihsan “return unto their Lord with gladness” while still walking upon the earth. 


To interiorize life itself and to become aware of the inward dimension, man must have recourse to rites whose very nature it is to cast a sacred form upon the waves of the ocean of multiplicity in order to save man and bring him back to the shores of Unity. The major rites or pillars (arkan) of Islam, namely the daily prayers (salat), fasting (sawm), the pilgrimage (hajj), the religious tax (zakat) and striving in the path of God (jihad), are all means of sanctifying man’s terrestrial life and enabling him to live and to die as a central being destined for beatitude. But these rites themselves are not limited to their outer forms. Rather they possess inward dimensions and levels of meaning which man can reach in function of the degree of his faith (iman) and the intensity and quality of his virtue or inner beauty (ihsan). 


The salat punctuates man’s daily existence, determines its rhythm, provides a refuge in the storm of life and protects man from sin. Yet, the meaning of the prayers are not to be understood solely through the study of their external form or their impact upon Islamic society, as fundamental as those may be. By virtue of the degree of man’s ihsan, and also by virtue of the grace (barakah) contained within the sacred forms of the prayers, man is able to attain inwardness through the very external forms of the prayers.


Not only do the canonical prayers possess an interior dimension, but they also serve as the basis for other forms of prayer which become ever more inward as man progresses upon the spiritual path leading finally to the “prayer of the heart”, the invocation (dhikr) in which the invoker, invocation and the invoked become united, and through which man returns to the Center, to the Origin which is pure Inwardness. The interior life of Islam is based most of all upon the power of prayer and the grace issuing from the sacred language of Arabic in which various prayers are performed.

This miserable world of ours no longer remains a fit place for human habitation. Its condition is rapidly deteriorating and even the best leaders and most powerful cliques of the day seem powerless of stem the tide of events leading us to destruction. Despite all the modern comforts and luxuries, all the discoveries and invention, all the international understandings and treaties, and despite all the illusory glamour of a much boasted civilization, the sweet memory of a sublime past still lingers in the mind of a disappointed and despondent humanity. The world is sadder but not wiser, even after passing through the two terrible wars that came one after the other in quick succession within the first half of the present century. Still greater calamities are staring us in the face and we stand aghast, helpless and seemingly doomed.


The condition of the world has never been worse than it is today. Whether in peace of war, the picture remains almost the same. In certain respects it is even worse in peace than in war. Moral degradation and material disintegration have blackened the whole picture. The forces of evil are in ascendance and all sense of security has disappeared. Recent discoveries in the realm of science have no doubt contributed too many of the physical comforts in life, but these comforts pale into insignificance before the disastrous effects of the moral depravity of man. Individuals, classes, communities and nations do not trust one another and their distrust is perfectly justifiable. Reason and arguments have lost their appeal. Justice and fairplay have lost their dignity. Brute force gets the job done. Hypocrisy, dishonesty, falsehood, treachery, and selfishness of the mean type have become the most coveted stock-in-trade of the modern masses. There do exist honorable exceptions, but scattered and solitary exceptions do not make the rule. Contentment and peace of mind can hardly flourish in this criminal atmosphere. The laws of nature are never partial. Cruelty to weaker groups and smaller nations, dishonest propaganda and misrepresentation of facts, expressional misrepresentation and inexactitude, defiance or realities and persistent efforts to fool the world, these and other similar sins of commission and omission must inevitably invite Divine Vengeance.


Do people still want to be told that, as things stand, their future is dark, very dark indeed? Do they still require another century to learn that material progress and scientific achievements without a good and genuine moral background are capable of very great mischief? There can be no smooth and sustained progress without religion, and no religion can be true, authentic and complete unless it is comprehensive enough to furnish mankind with a complete code of life.

No matter what activity or goal you wish to pursue, there must be an effort to make an intention, to think clearly about what it is you are about to undertake and for what reason. It is narrated by ‘Umar ibn Al-Khattab that our beloved Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) said, “The reward of deeds depends upon the intentions, and every person will get the reward according to what he has intended” (Al-Bukhari).


Working on your intentions right at the outset also serves the purpose of helping to develop a clear objective and, God willing, a concrete sense of what is needed to achieve the objective and how much time will be needed to do so. When your motivation suffers midway through the process of achieving a particular objective, it is highly likely that the intention itself was not clear at the outset and therefore distractions easily slipped in and the focus became unclear.