All the prophets (as) have taught the same truths, since Adam (as), the first prophet on earth. They are taught faith in God the Unique, Who does not beget and was not begotten, the existence of angels, of paradise and hell, the Last Judgement, obedience to the prophet, etc.
The beliefs have remained the same through the ages, only the rites of worship have changed and evolved according to the time and the prophet. But with the proclamation of Muhammad (pbuh) as the seal of all prophets, the ritual teaching of all previous prophets (as) is abrogated. The only teaching now recognized and accepted by God is that of His prophet Muhammad (pbuh), any other way being condemned forever.
The value of a teaching is in the measure of the one who taught it. The Holy Prophet (pbuh) is superior to all prophets (as) and to all men; his rank comes just after that of Allah the Majestic. His teaching is therefore superior to all the others that exist today, or that will be born until the end of the world.
The laws, obligations and prohibitions, dictated by a prophet, do not come from himself, from a creature. They are revealed to him and inspired by the Supreme Creator, the Perfect Intelligence, The One Who knows the past, the present as well as the future. The One Who has power over everything, over every creature.
The divine laws, known
thanks to the prophet, are based on a perfect knowledge of human nature, its
capacities and its weaknesses, on this reality that the perfect happiness and
the true success of the man are in the Other World, this world here on earth
being only a preparation. They are dictated for the sole purpose of general
interest, for the sole good of all creatures, without any discrimination.
Allah (twt) does not
need anyone or anything. He derives no benefit from any creature or thing; He
is self-sufficient, while everything depends on Him. He desires no harm for His
creature. On the contrary, He desires for it more good than it can desire for
itself!
Allah is the Most
Merciful of the Merciful, that is to say, He desires good for us more than we
desire it for ourselves. If someone begins to imagine and enumerate all the
material and spiritual benefits that he would like, and arrives at a certain
sum, the good that the All-Merciful Creator desires for him will exceed
anything he could have imagined!
In a verse of the Holy Quran,
Allah (twt) says: “Allah does not impose on any
soul a burden greater than its capacity.” [Al-Baqara 2: 287]
In summary, all divine
laws can only bring us good, and we all have the ability to put them into
practice. But this implies voluntary, sincere and total submission.
There is only one force
in this world that engenders such submission: it is love. The lover is
naturally subject to the thing he loves, or the person he loves. He is ready to
do anything to satisfy his beloved. History and the present are not lacking in
examples of men and women who, out of love, have done things that are
apparently very difficult, sometimes extraordinary, at the limit of human
capacities. Someone said with discernment: “Love has reasons which reason cannot
understand”. One must become a lover in order to advance easily and quickly
in the path of Allah.
The ascetic who is not
a lover,
Take a step forward
after a month.
The lover, with each
breath,
Reaches the Throne of
Allah.
There are thousands of
obstacles in Laila’s path.
The first condition is
that,
From the first step,
you become Majnu.
The love of Allah and
His Prophet is therefore essential in this path. Through love, poison becomes
honey. The love of Allah transforms the difficulties that may arise in the
practice of Shariah into facilities, and even into pleasures. What was
apparently bitter becomes good, and even sweet.
The human love, of a
believing man towards a woman or vice versa, or his love for another creature
of Allah is incomparable to his love for Allah. Love for the Creator is much
more powerful, much more enduring. Love for a woman fades and disappears with
the fatal alteration of her physical and intellectual qualities, or with the
meeting of another woman who possesses more qualities. The beauty, splendour,
power and all other attributes of Allah never diminish; they increase in
quality with every fraction of a second.
The more we love Allah,
the more He constantly increases in splendour, the attraction and the love that
we feel for Him. This attraction and love will intensify accordingly.
Through love, iron
becomes gold. The love of Allah transforms lack of devotion into passion,
hypocrisy into sincerity, bad habits and sins into noble actions and sincere
worship.
It acts as the philosopher’s
stone that transforms base metal into noble metal. This is how the Holy Prophet
(pbuh) said in the sense that any of his companions who spends a handful of
barley in the way of Allah receives more rewards than another Muslim (who is
not a Sahaba) who would spend the mountain of Uhud turned into gold.
This superiority in the
value of the action is absolutely not due to an arbitrary preference, but to
the superiority of the degree of love and sincerity that the Sahaba had, which
no one after them will be able to reach, except the Sahaba of another prophet-follower
of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).
Through love, the lion
becomes a mouse. When the heart overflows with love for Allah, pride, arrogance,
mind, reason naturally submit to Allah’s pleasure.
Hazrat Umar (ra) once
called Bilal, carelessly and without contempt, in these words: “O black man!”
At once his bright heart felt that his tongue should not have called him by
those words, even without contempt. He said to him: “O Bilal! I shouldn’t
have called you that. I will lie on the ground, step on me so that my tongue
does not make this mistake anymore, and my heart stays away from pride and
arrogance.”
Subhan Allah! How could
a man like Umar (ra), such a reckless, fearless and blameless knight, feared by
all the greatest warriors, and even Satan, humble himself like this before a
freed slave? Only the love of Allah can produce such a miracle!
Through love, the witch
becomes a muse. The love of the Most High is a talisman that disenchants the
human being from the evil effects of Satan and the ego, which falsifies the
reality of things. He sees Islam, good deeds, virtues, friends of Allah as bad,
ugly, repulsive, or futile things. On the other hand, he sees sins,
perversions, unbelief, and unrestrained freedom as good things, pleasant,
useful, and he makes them his food and his life. The love of Allah the Most
High unravels this spell, and gives man a true look at reality.
I tell you a story to illustrate this fact. A king had a very handsome, very cultured son, who was his pride. He gave him as a wife a very beautiful woman, who was also a treasure of kindness and piety. A few months later, the king, who was hoping for descendants, found that nothing was coming. He was very worried about it, and called his council together in secret. He instructed them to investigate this fact with the utmost discretion.
Shortly after, the secret agents came to report to the king, and the latter learned with great sorrow that his son had been bewitched by an old woman who lives near the castle. Seeing the handsome prince pass by her house every day, she fell in love with him and bewitched him. The effect of the spell was that the prince saw his wife, actually more beautiful than the moon, as a toothless old woman with a repulsive face and body, and therefore never slept with her. The old woman, on the other hand, appeared to him like a muse, with an angelic face and graceful forms, and he spent every night with her.
The king was grieved,
distributed a lot of charity to ward off this misfortune, and wept a lot. One
day when he was shedding tears in the Sijda, a man appeared from the
Invisible and said to him: “Don’t cry anymore. Allah has heard your laments.
I have the solution to your pain, follow me.”
The man took him to a cemetery, and, arriving near an old tomb, dug a little in
the ground. He pulled out a hair which belonged to the prince, which had evil
knots in it. He untied the knots one by one by reading prayers. As he broke the
curse there and then, the prince gradually returned to his normal state. At the
opening of the last knot, he was completely cured of the evil spell. He was
just going to visit the old woman when he saw her, this time in her true form,
he couldn’t help vomiting in disgust, and remained amazed at the attraction he
had felt for this woman, ugliness personified, which would scare even the
greatest demon!
He fled from this horror, and went to find his wife. When he saw her, her dazzling beauty struck him so hard that he fainted. When he regained consciousness, he gradually began to accustom his eyes to this sun, and then said to her: “How could I leave you for that old witch! Your beauty eclipses the sun, while her ugliness gives off the stench of carrion!”
Satan and the ego
bewitch us in such a way that this world appears to us as a perfect beauty, so
seductive that we spend all our time with it. Religion, the Other World [i.e.
the Hereafter], on the contrary, appears to us as ugliness personified, and we
completely turn away from it. The love of Allah breaks this spell, and restores
our true gaze.
So we see that the love of Allah has immense virtues. All of us, without exception, have some degree of love for Allah and His Prophet. But do we have that degree of love which transforms poison into honey, iron into gold, the lion into a mouse, the witch into a muse? Do we have the degree of love demanded by Allah and His Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)?
Allah announces in the
Holy Quran: “Those who believe love Allah
most...” [Al-Baqara 2: 166]
The Holy Prophet (pbuh) said: “None of you can become a perfect Muslim until
his love for me exceeds the love he has for his children, his parents and for
all mankind.” [Bukhari, Muslim, Ahmad, An-Nasai, Ibn Majah]
It is this love that
surpasses all other loves that we have to acquire, and the practice of Sunnat
is a very powerful, very easy and very sure means of it. Allah (twt) says in
the Holy Quran: “Say: If you claim to love
Allah, then follow my way, Allah will love you, and forgive your sins.” [Ali-Imran 3: 32]
Whoever conforms
externally and internally to the way of life left by our beloved Prophet
Muhammad (pbuh) will therefore be loved by Allah. When Allah (twt) loves a
person, that person also begins to love Him. The creature’s love for the
Creator is only the reflection, the consequence of the Creator’s love for it.
Allah (twt) says in the
Holy Quran: “O you who believe! If some of you renounce
your faith, God will raise up other men whom He will love and who will love
Him, humble towards the believers, harsh towards the deniers, they will fight
in the service of God, without the fear of any reproach. Such is the grace of
God, which He grants to whom He wills, for God is All-Bountiful, All-Knowing.”
[Al-Maida, 5: 55]
“Whom He will love and
who will love Him”, that
is to say, these people will love Allah (twt) by the blessing of the love He
bestows on them.
So, in order to acquire this divine love, the Sunnah includes three
things:
- The most perfect way to do a good deed.
- The
easiest way to do a good deed.
- The
most beautiful way to do a good deed.
Limiting a person’s habits inevitably leads to 2 things: respect, and love for
that person.
In everyday life, we find that the appearance of things matters a lot. When you want to do an electrical installation, what do you do first? We install the wires, switches, lamps, meter, etc. The current comes later. Without prior installation, how can the current come and make [or give] light?
In Islam too, the
outward religious aspect is of great importance. You don’t have to wait until
you have a lot of piety to put the Sunnah into practice. Let us begin to
adopt the blessed habits of the noble Prophet (pbuh), the love of Allah will
increase in the heart, and with this strength we will be able to put into
practice other more important Sunnat, as well as the commandments of the
Shariah.
The Sunnah is not an additional action. It is only a particular way of doing things that we usually do in another way; so why not do these same things the Sunnah way? All it takes is a little attention at first, and over time, these Sunnat will become habits.
When we eat, we may use the left hand, the right hand, or both; the Sunnah is to eat with the right hand only. When we enter the Mosque, we may enter with the left foot, or the right foot. The Sunnah is to enter with the right foot. When we lie down, we may be able to lie on our back, on our stomach, on our right or left side. The Sunnah is to lie on the right side. And so on for all the other Sunnat.
By putting them into practice, all the gestures we make dozens of times a day will become meaningful, take on great value, and be classified as acts of worship. In this way, we will obtain the pleasure of Allah without making great efforts.
May Allah help us all to transform our lives into Sunnah lives, which receive the seal of divine love, enabling us to live in peace with ourselves and with others and to live in Allah and to have Allah live in us. Insha-Allah, Ameen.
---Friday Sermon of 14 January 2022~11 Jamadi’ul Aakhir 1443 AH delivered by Imam- Jamaat Ul Sahih Al Islam Hazrat Khalifatullah Munir A. Azim (atba) of Mauritius.