The End of Year New Year Message

The following is summarized from a talk given bySayyidī al-Ḥabīb `Umar bin Hafīẓ (may Allāh preserve him and benefit us by him): 1 We bid farewell to a to another year of the Hijrah of the Messenger of Allahﷺ, a year which contains a number of days and nights which are what makes up your lifespan. If a day passes then a part of you has passed. You are but a body and spirit existent in a limited time period. When that period comes to an end you come to an end. It is only those of sound intellect who realize the true value of these days and nights that pass. They know thatitis He Who made the Night and the Day to follow each other: for the one who wishes to reflect or to show gratitude. 2Whatever anyone has achieved in these days and nights that has not increased them in reflection and gratitude has missed the purpose and fundamental wisdom for which these days and nights were created and for which mankind was created. We witness the passing of time and the alternation of seasons and changes and events. Things which are agreeable to us; things which are unpleasant – all of which test us. We witness the passing away of those who live alongside us, some of it expected, some of it unexpected. All of this is by the decree of the All-Powerful Sovereign. Likewise we welcome a new year. Every individual must look at their level of reflection and gratitude so they may obtain their provision from these days and nights. One of the meanings of reflection is removing the veils from the spirit to allow it to remember the original covenant which it took with its Lord and clearing away the dust to enable it to extend its gaze to its eventual destination. As for gratitude, everything which is of any benefit to creation comes into its sphere. The Master of Creationﷺsaid: “Should I not be a grateful slave?” He is the most grateful of creation to the Creator, and through his gratitude we show gratitude to the Creator. May Allah bind us to him in this life and the next. Itis He Who made the Night and the Day to follow each other: for the one who wishes to reflect or to show gratitude. What are the signs and the attributes of the people of reflection and gratitude? Read the eleven attributes that follow this verse, beginning with: The slaves of the Most Gracious are those who walk on the earth in humility, and when the ignorant address them, they say, “Peace!” (They are) those who spend the night in worship of their Lord prostrate and standing.. 3 Reflect upon these attributes and ask yourself what portion you have of them. Do not be content merely to pass over them superficially. Delve into them deeply, hold firm to them and embody their meanings. Each of these attributes has a residing place in your inner being. If each attribute finds its place you will, in your inner being, be one of the slaves of the Most Gracious and every day and night you will increase in reflection and gratitude, and He will prepare you for an indescribable reward. “I have prepared for My righteous slaves that which no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and what no man can imagine.” The majority of the people of Islam and Iman have made no preparation for the vision of the face of the Best of Mankind, accompanying him on the day of Crowding and then in Dar al-Salām, the Abode of Peace. Does this warrant you giving anything less than your all? How much have you put towards this: of your thoughts, your actions, the attributes of your heart, of the hours of your day and night? After the death of the Messenger of Allahﷺ,Sayyidunā Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq would spend his nights crying out of his longing for him. Do we allow the ups and downs of this fleeting life and the desires of our enemies to tear these feelings away from us? Will you exchange the better for the worse? 4 All you who believe, accompanying him is greater than anything we can imagine. There is no gift more exquisite with which the Lord of the Throne may bless than his companionship and the vision of his face and addressing the possessor of that face. He is a man like no other, the Beloved of the Creator. If these feelings were alive in the hearts of the Ummah, all causes of evil inward and outward would be removed and the Ummah would be safe from every tribulation. The level of tribulation in which we find ourselves is according to our deficiency in our love for Allah and His Chosen Oneﷺ At the end of this year may Allah grant us the ability to please His Beloved through seeking to improve our states and our transactions and what takes places in our houses and what is in our hearts. Nothing should be more beloved to us than Allah and nothing in creation, not even Paradise, should be more beloved to us than Muhammad. No created thing can take precedence over Muhammad, because Allah Himself gave him precedence over all of creation. For this reason the Companion Rabi`ah ibn Ka`b could think of nothing better to ask from the Messenger of Allah than his companionship in Paradise. The response of the Messenger of Allahﷺwas to order him to make abundant prostration. The closest a slave is to Allah is when he is in prostration. If you desire to be close to the one who is closest to Allah, make abundant prostration. One of the meanings of this prostration is to rid our houses of anything which contravenes his Sunnahﷺ. Let this Hijrī year finish and with it any contravention of the Sunnah. This is prostration. You want to accompany him but you do not want to live in accordance with his teaching? Let this year finish and you are in a state of preparation to meet the best of Allah’s slavesﷺ. — 1Jalsat al-Ithnayn, Jāmi` Tarīm, the night of 25th Dhu’l-Ḥijjah 1429 2 Al-Furqān, 25:62 3Al-Furqān, 25:63-74 4Al-Baqarah, 2:61

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.