Value OF Time More Than Money

A miser had accumulated, by effort, trade and lending, three hunderd thousand dinars. He had lands and buildings, and all kinds of wealth. He then decided that he would spend a year in enjoyment, living comfortably, and then decide as what his future should be. But, almost as soon as he had stopped amassing money the Angel of Death appeared before him, to take his life away. The miser tried, by every argument which he could muster, to dissuade the Angel, who seemed, however, adament. Then the man said: "Grant me but three more days and I will give you one-third of my possessions." The angel refused, and pulled again at the miser's life, tugging to take it away. Then the man said: "If you only allow me two more days on earth, I will give you two hundred thousand dinars from my store." But the Angel would not listen to him. And the Angel even refused to give the man a solitary extra day for all his three hundred thousand pieces. The the miser said: "Please, then, give me just time enough to write one little thing down." This time the Angel allowed him this single concession, and the man wrote, with his own blood: "Man, make use of your life. I could not buy one hour for three hundred thousand dinars. Make sure that you realize the value of your time." Source: Obtained from the book "The Way of the Sufi" by Idries Shah.

O Allah!

[From Imam Ghazali's My Dear Beloved Son] “O my Allah! I desire from You the completion (abundance/perfection) of Your blessings and from purity (inner and outer) I desire its permanence and from Your mercy [I desire] its inclusion [in all matters] and from health [I desire] its attainment and from sustenance [I desire] its increase and from life [I desire] its happiness and from life [I desire] its real success and from good qualities [I desire] their completion and from your rewards [I desire] the reward which is the most common and from your plenitude [I desire] the plenitude which is the sweetest and from your favors [I desire] the favor which is the most plentiful and from deeds [I desire] the deed which is the best and from knowledge [I desire] the knowledge which is the most beneficial and from the sustenance [I desire] the sustenance which is the most plentiful. O my Allah! You become ours (grant us benefits) and do not burden us (protect us from harms). O my Allah! Grant us salvation when we die and reform our deeds and grant us safety in your days and nights and grant us your mercy in our houses and in our possessions and cover our sins and fault with the cover of your forgiveness and do us favors by correcting all our faults [inner and outer] and give us confidence and reliance on You. O my Allah! Grant us perseverance and persistence in our Deen (religion/Path to God). Save us from such deeds in the world that will become a source of shame (humiliation) on the Day of Judgment and lessen the burdens of our sins on us and grant us a life of the pious ones and be sufficient to us in all our affairs and protect us from the evil of the evildoers. Liberate us and our ancestors, from the fire of Hell, from loans, and from oppression O You the Victorious One (Ya Aziz)! O You the Forgiving One (Ya Ghaffar)! O You the Generous One (Ya Kareem)! O You the Coverer of faults (Ya Sattar)! O You the Tolerant One (Ya Haleem)! O You the Powerful One (Ya Jabbar)! O You the Magnificent One (Ya Azeem)! O You the One Who Punishes (Ya Qahhar)! O Allah! O Allah! O Allah! O You the Compassionate One (Ya Rahman) in this world! O You the Merciful One (Ya Raheem) in the life hereafter! O You the Supreme Merciful One (Ya Arhum ur-Rahimeen)! You are the Grantor of the Excessive Mercy! And may the mercy and blessings of Allah always descend on Muhammad (Peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) who is the best of all [of God's] creations [from eternity to eternity] and on his descendants and on his companions. All praises are solely due to Allah the Lord of all the Universes (Rabb ul-’Alameen).”

Be a Story That is Pleasing to Remember:

Sultan Walad told the following to Salahuddin Malati who told us: At the end of his life, my grandfather (Bahauddin Walad), the Great Master (may Allāh preserve his innermost secret), gave my father the following advice, "O Jalauddin Muhammad, I am returning to God I will be brought near the Lights of His Essence. We are born of His Essence and to Essence we return. O My fiends! Pray for our journey. "Those who return to the World Beyond, those who are directed to the Great Assembly, convey news to their predecessors about the morals and behaviour of their successors and what has happened to them. O Great God! Make a great effort, so that I can be happy and glorious in His Presence and that I might not be embarrassed and bow my head with shame. Put this advice in your ear like a golden earring: Men are just stories, so be a tale that is pleasing to remember." My father did as he was told, even one hundred thousand times better, he eventually reached such perfection that he said: O my heart! Due to your dissolution and intoxication, you don't speak the words of a father, nor do you have the desire of a son. -Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (r.a).

An exposition on the merit of the remembrance of death:

He said ﷺ, "Remember often the decapitator of pleasures.' And said, 'Were cattle to know about death what you know, you would not find among them a fat one to eat.' And 'Ā'yshah said, 'O Messenger of God, will anyone else be resurrected in the company of martyrs?' He replied, Yes, one that remembers death twenty times in every day and night.' And said ﷺ, The treasure of the believer is death. And said, 'Sufficient is death as an admonisher.' Oneday, he left for the mosque, and came upon a group of people talking and laughing. He said, 'Remember death! For by the One in Whose Hand is my soul, if you knew what I know, you would laugh very little and weep a lot.' And know that death is a terrible and enormous occurrence. Remembering it induces an aversion to the abode of vanity, a curtailment of pleasure, and a preparing for it. Yes, a man who remembers it witha preoccupied heart will not show its effect on him. The way to circumvent that is to empty his heart of anything other than it, and contemplate it as if he is contemplating a journey he is preparing for, by land or by sea; for then his heart would be overcome with contemplation upon it, and preparing for it, and nothing else. Imām Muhammad bin Muhammad Abū Hāmid al-Ghazzālī in the 40th Chapter of his Ihyā Ulūm al-Dīn.

Sufism By Junaid bAGHDADI

Imam Junayd as-Salik {May Allah have mercy upon him} said: ‘Sufism means that God makes you die to yourself and makes you alive in Him. It is to purify the heart from the recurrence of creaturely temptations, to say farewell to all the natural inclinations, to subdue the qualities which belong to human nature,to keep far from the claims of the senses, to adhere to spiritual qualities, to ascend by means of Divine knowledge, to be occupied with that is eternally thebest, to give wise counsel to all people, faithfully to observe the truth, and to follow the Prophet( şάĻάĻĻάħù'άĻάч'ħέ'ώά'şάĻĻάм ) in respect of the religious law. {Ihya Ulum ad-Din ~ The Revival of the Islamic Sciences}

Wise Teaching Of Saint

Wise teaching of a Saint: I, Amadou Hampate Ba asked him (Shyakh Tierno Bokar) what he thought of struggles [jihad] that were ordered in the name of religion. He said: Personally, the only struggle that I am enthusiastic about is the one that has its goal the conquering ofour own faults within ourselves. Unfortunately, this kind of struggle plays no part in the wars that the sons of Adam undertake in the name of a God whom they declare to love so much, but whom they love poorly because they destroy part of His work. Brothers of all religion, let us in God lower the boundaries that separate us. Down with the artificial creations that pit human beings against each other. We have distanced ourselves from God, we have lost ourselves in the labyrinths of our own disastrous edifice that was built from bricks of lies and with the mortar of calumny. Let us quickly leave this place that was so sadly arranged by our pride and our egoism and by the laxity of our manners and the hardness of our hearts. Let us fly as an eagle with powerful wings toward the union of hearts, towards a religion thatis not inclined towards the exclusion of other “credos” but towards a universal union of believers, freed from their own selves and morallyliberated from the appetites of the world. From the height of a heaven of love, we shall, as one, attest piously to the Unity of God, which is the source of Life that spreads light and which cannot be enclosed within any human definition. This religion which Jesus sought to deliver and wasloved by Muhammad, is that which, like pure air, isin permanent contact with the sun of Truth and Justice, as well as with the Love of the Good and Charity for all. These were the words of the Shaykh from a modest room of dried earth in the heart of black Africa in 1933.

Imam al-Nawawi: Think Before You Speak

'A still tongue makes a wise head', says one proverb. It has also been said: 'The wounds of a sword may heal one day; the wounds of the tongue, they never may.' And then there is this note of caution: 'Speak when you're angry and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret.' While it is true that great good can come from the tongue, it is also true that the tongue can stir up immense enmity and strife. The tongue, despite it being a small organ of the body, has an influence wholly disproportionate to its size. How many conflicts, divisions, divorces and distresses have been triggered by angry words and unbridled tongues! Unfortunately, the tongue as a source of evil is something that our communicative and social-networking culture seldom considers. In contrast to the modern urge to endlessly yap, yell and yodel, our ancients recognized that when a carpet ofsilence is laid, wisdom begins to settle. As part of his celebrated and encyclopedic anthology of transmitted prayers from the Prophet, al-Adhkar, imāmal-Nawawi (d.676H/1277CE) devotes a separate chapter on the obligation to guard the tongue and the merits of silence. The following is a translation of the opening segments of that discussion: ♦ 'Know that it is required of every legally responsible person (mukallaf) that they guard their tongue from all types of speech, save that which contains an overriding benefit. Whenever speaking or keeping silent are equal in their benefits, then the sunnah is to refrain from speaking. For speech that starts off as permissible can quickly degenerate into what is forbidden or disliked. In fact, this occurs a lot, or is more often the habit; and there is no substitute for safety. It is related in the Ṣaḥīḥsof al-Bukhāri [no.2018] and Muslim [no.47]; on the authority of Abu Hurayrah, may God be pleased with him; who relates that the Prophet, declared: 'Whoever believes in God and the Last Day, let him speak well or keep quiet.' I say: The soundness of this ḥadīthis agreed upon and contains an explicit stipulation that one must not speak unlessone's words are good and that the benefitin doing so is clear and preponderant. Whenever there is uncertainty about the benefit being preponderant or not, one remains silent.ImāmAl-Shāfi'i, may God have mercy upon him, has said: “When one intends to speak, let him think before he does so. If there is an overriding benefit, let him speak; but if in doubt, let him desist from speaking until the benefit is clear.”' Al-Nawawi, al-Adhkar (Jeddah: Dar al-Minhaj, 2008)