A to Z praying – Part 1

Praying is meant to be a wonderful spiritual experience that we get to do 5 times a day at least. And for those of us who truly feel its power –or those who are looking for more thawab, it’s more than 5 times. The Prophet (PBUH) has once said the above words to Bilal, the Muezzin who called for the prayer at that time (the translation is rough to say the least but it’s better than google’s translation). Prayer gives us comfort, an outlet from life and a moment with God. We should feel eager to do it before we start and satisfied or even wanting more after we’re done, but we don’t always feel that. I think part of it is because we don’t fully grasp the process of praying and all the other rituals relating to it, they just pass us by completely.

First ritual: The Azan

I think, living in an Islamic country where listening to the Azan is something so completely normal and used to, maybe makes me forget the true meaning of the words said through it.

Allaho Akbar: God is greatest! This is the first call, the God is greater than you, and God is greater than whatever it is you’re doing, and God is calling you to come now and pray. So why is it do we answer the call so sluggishly?! These words are enough to make us jump out of our seats, drop everything and run to pray. Moreover, it is repeated for times at the beginning of the Azan, so if we start thinking “I’ll just finish this first” then by the fourth Allah Akbar, we should know that we will finish this later!

Ash-hadu an la ilah illa Allah, Ash-hadu an Muhammad Rasul Allah: the shahada, testifying that you are a muslim and thus will hear this call and go pray.

7ay 3ala el salah: come to prayer! Self explained and profound :)

7ay 3ala el fala7: come to work, also may be interpreted as come to success. For the first meaning, it related prayer to work because all muslims have to work in some way or another to better serve their faith. The second interpretation would be related to prayer helping in success; either in life or in death, praying will help you succeed.

Then Allaho Akbar and the Shahada are repeated, concluding that amazing message: we should pray because Allah is greatest and we are muslims.

I don’t think about all that when I hear the azan, but I try to because when I do, my heart goes to wanting to pray rather than thinking of it as something that needs to be done and that’s it!

Coming soon, wodou’

 

Technorati Tags: Islam,Prayer,Azan

Recharging the Spiritual Batteries

I’ve always felt slightly guilty whenever I did any activity that did not have a religious basis. Watching movies, going to concerts, hanging out with friends, even reading books which is a hobby I am completely devoted to. All that made me feel guilty because I was wasting time in doing things while I could be learning more about Islam or reading Quran. This feeling most of the time made me end up not doing that specific “fun” activity and not doing any of the “religious” or “spiritual” activities which I’ve wanted to do. So I end up with a lot of time wasted without having fun or learning or even recharging my spiritual batteries. That made me feel guiltier about the amount of time wasted in complete nothingness and on I go into that endless loop.

During the past few months, I’ve undergone some major changes in my life, and I mean MAJOR! And since I wasn’t exactly in the best of moods, I decided to become a “Yes Man” or in this case “Yes Woman”. I wasn’t saying no to any opportunities, trying as much as possible to live life and just enjoy the simple and not so simple pleasures (apparently shopping if more fun when you’re a size smaller ;) ). It worked too! I’ve been doing things and enjoying life without having to wonder who thinks what of whatever it is I’m doing, and it’s working like a charm because I’ve never felt better. And out of the blue, I started doing the spiritual things too. I always wanted to read more Quran, pray the Sunnah prayers, and most of all, I’ve always wanted to read the explanations of the Quran verses, and stop at every single verse and just think, admire, and wonder, which is how Quran should really be read in my opinion. What is interesting is that, not only am I enjoying life, having fun, doing new things and meeting new people, I am also working on recharging my religious batteries as I should. I don’t feel guilty about going out instead of listening to a religious lecture because I’m doing it all at the end of the day!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have to feel guilty in order to start practicing religion. I don’t have to keep myself locked up and closed up in order to be a better muslim. I don’t have to read Quran out of fear because it is much lovelier to be done out of love and interest and a guiltless heart. What I have discovered is that:

{ إنك لا تهدي من أحببت ولكن الله يهدي من يشاء }

{You cannot guide whom you love, but Allah guides whom He wills}

We shouldn’t feel pressured to practice religious activities because we have to. I am not saying that we don’t have to, and that we shouldn’t always keep that thought in our minds, I am saying that Allah knows if our hearts feel dull, and He is merciful. As long as we don’t forget Him, He will remember us and will take away that dullness and despair.

I was wondering about all that for the past few days until yesterday, I was reading the Sha’rawy’s interpretation of Quran. He was saying that Omar Ibn Al-Khattab had his heart open to Islam only after he hit his sister and saw the blood out of the pain that he had caused her. At that moment, his heart softened. It wasn’t the first time that he had heard someone reading Quran, he had heard it lots of times before but it was never with his heart so open to receiving something as beautiful as Quran. He read some verses for the chapter of Taha, it touched him and he turned to Islam. It hadn’t touched him before because he wasn’t ready for it. The same thing goes for any religious activity, if I’m not ready for it, then even if I actually do it, it will never work as it should. When I had a sick heart, I wasn’t able to dive into more religion because it didn’t touch me the way it should. Instead, I took the time to ask God to help heal my heart, I did my dues, I tried as much as I can to keep that religious link open and to remember Allah in what I do because I knew that the day would come when God heard my prayers and healed me, and then I would worship him as I should, out of love and devotion not out of guilt and fear. Thank God that the day came after a few months rather than a few years.

To sum up, for all those who have felt equally guilty at not trying hard enough or not doing it right, I tell you: you will never do it right unless you fix your heart first. And even though Islam is beautiful for those with sick hearts, it will never work to go into religion as a chore, or out of guilt, but only if it’s done out of love for Allah that we can truly be able to recharge our spiritual batteries.

P.S. for all of those who think that making a muslim feel guilty is the way to have them do more for Islam and their religion, then I tell you that you are ILLUDED if you think that anything we do is ever enough to truly worship Allah the way we should, and you should all know that. To shame another muslim into praying or fasting or spreading a word of God is not the Islamic way to do it. Allah sees through our hearts and minds, and He knows what practices are true and what practices are for show, so please learn how to help people into Islam, not shame them into it. May God be with us all in recharging our spiritual batteries.

Eat, Pray, Love – Lesson 2

Obviously, one third of the movie is about praying. And yes, there is a lesson we could all learn from a character in a movie/book that feels the need to pray. Liz goes to India, half way around the world, to pray and chant and meditate. It doesn’t go so smoothly; she’s late for chanting and she does it with no feeling of devotion. She tried to meditate and all she ends up thinking about are minor worldly issues like decorating her room. She is too preoccupied by the world to give in to the peace of praying, or in her case, meditating.

This rings a giant bell! I pray and concentrate really hard on concentrating during praying. I think of being in the presence of God and of how cleansed I should feel, and then I drift to how I have to pick up some meds on my way home! I would love to go into how we should pray from the heart and prepare our souls for the prayer before actually doing the prayer, but that is not the lesson I have learned from the movie. The lesson I’ve learned is that it doesn’t come easily. The idea of how Liz was able to succeed at the praying part was because she stopped wishing that it would hit her in the face and she actually started working hard on trying to reach that state of enlightenment instead. For her it was chanting and meditation, for me it’s reading Quran and making sure I understand the message in between the lines, realizing the miracle of the holy book, admiring God’s creations (which is meditating, sometimes I think people forget how we are required to look around and think about life, the universe, and everything), I also think a big part of it is just letting go of the world.

It’s not easy to commit to reading Quran daily, fasting out of Ramadan, praying more, and dedicating half an hour of one’s time for the pure and simple act of admiring the world. Personally, I get preoccupied with life; what I have to do, where I want to go, what I should do with my life, etc. And with this preoccupation I forget that at the end of the day, I don’t really find the answers, and I feel desperate and depressed and end up wishing for God to help me. And when I classify that, it falls under taking the shortcut of wishing desperately for enlightenment to hit me when it won’t. I forget that religion is in the heart, and to be open to Islam I need to prepare my heart if it’s not ready (which it obviously is not), and to do that, I have to work hard for it. After all, it is a blessing to feel enlightened, and good things don’t come easily.

Eat, Pray, Love – Lesson 1

I’ve just watched Eat, Pray, Love. And regardless of what I think of the movie, I think there are some precious lessons learned from it. Liz, the heroine, starts by feeling that she has lost the appetite for life. And in one scene, she is starting to pray to God which is something she had not done in a very long time, if ever. It’s a clumsy act of her, she doesn’t know how to pray or what to say, but she feels the need to ask God to guide her into fixing what has become of her life. I was incredibly touched by this scene because I think I’ve been in her shoes. I think I’m still in her shoes. At some point, I feel like the world has become too small, my skin too tight, my mind too full of so much nonsense that goes in my life, and my heart too heavy for me to handle. It is that moment of total despair where I know that if I talk to God, He will listen to what I have to say, and He will know, and He will understand. Most importantly, He will help me get through it even if it’s by letting me forget some of that despair in order to be able to continue living for one more hour, or one more day.

I think for me the essence of that moment is what I keep missing. This is the moment of surrender, the moment where a muslim is truly muslim. It is the moment of acceptance. And for me, it is a leap of faith when I decide to jump off a 150 meter building and know that God will catch me. I do it, I jump, and I cry, and I talk to God, and I ask Him with every molecule of my body to save me. But I don’t do it as completely as I wish I could. I got this hook in my heart and my mind that is not willing to let go. This hook holds me back, keeps me in the world where everything goes wrong, and I have absolutely no idea how to get rid of this hook. I think part of me doesn’t want to because it’s afraid of not being able to handle it; I won’t be able to stop sinning, I won’t be able to quit my bad habits. The other side of the hook is the part of me that drives the sinning and the wrong habit, the devil in me so to speak, the part that enjoys the mischief even if it hurts me the most in the end.

So what to do? I’m currently not doing anything (very big fat wrong) because I am convinced I’m not strong enough to let go just yet. I’m trying, and I’m praying, and I know I do not do enough because I know I’m not committed enough. The devil in me is telling me that I’m still “a good girl” despite everything so I forget to fix myself up some more, and the despair is still there, but at least God gave me a little window to clean up my act, and maybe I will before it’s too late.

Friday Prayer: One Happy Day

It’s Friday! The weekly Friday prayer is taking place in all the mosques around the house. Living in Cairo, in Egypt, gives me the privilege of listening to the Azan and to the Khutba. So I thought why not write something about that. Friday prayer is after all quite the event even though not everyone notices I guess. I was planning for my next topic (which I have been planning for for a couple of weeks trying to get it quite right) to be about praying from the heart, but I think the Friday prayer is worth it.

I am a girl so I don’t necessarily need to go pray the Friday prayer in the mosque. Men – and boys – are required to though. So I wake up on a Friday morning. It’s the first day of the weekend which already gives this nice feeling of relaxation. It’s gonna be a good day in sha’ Allah. The entire family is home. We have breakfast together in no rush, talk about this and that. The Azan for Friday prayer starts and off goes my brother to the mosque, as my dad used to (God rest his soul). I stay at home, the weather is nice, the window is open, not so many cars on the streets but they start to pile up near the mosques. The Imam starts the Khutba and I can hear it right here in my home. At the mosque, my brother among other people starts praying. The Friday prayer consists of the khutba which is a speech about anything socio-religious; about certain situations in the life of the Prophet PBUH, about religious events, or even about how we should be polite in dealing with other people. I heard a speech about anger management once which I liked a lot. So you listen and look at the ceiling of the mosque and feel the presence of God more abundantly all around you and all inside you. There is Duaa sometimes within it (please God grant me peace). The speech is peaceful, educational, religious, spiritual, thought provoking (hopefully), and there is this feeling of spiritual energy recharged, just like a battery. Will it charge you enough for the entire week? For the day? For a couple of hours to come? Will it inspire you to do some good, or maybe learn more about your religion? Depends on you and maybe on the speech and the Imam too.

The khutba may be 15 minutes, half an hour, maybe an hour, maybe two! There was this situation I remember from the times of early Islam when the Imam (I think it was was Uthman Ibn Affan but I couldn’t find the reference right now, so please anyone correct me if I’m wrong) and he forgot the speech he was planning to say, so he ended up saying only one statement! The speech could be THAT SHORT!

After the speech, there are two raka’as. The noon prayer, which is substituted by the Friday prayer on Friday, is four raka’as not two. But the speech is in the place of the two that were removed from this prayer. This means that we are required to listen to some person who probably knows more about religion for some time on Friday. We are required to recharge our spiritual batteries even if it’s just for a couple of minutes because the act of praying itself may not be enough because maybe it’s not completely from the heart and maybe I was in a hurry because I had a meeting when I prayed, and maybe there was too much noise so I couldn’t concentrate. But here you are in a mosque, listening to the Imam talking about religious matters, thinking consciously about our faith, and then adding to it a normal prayer to make it complete.

The really beautiful thing about Friday prayer is the post prayer rituals. Not exactly rituals of course, but there are just so many people so you will end up smiling at people you don’t know, maybe helping an old man with something, seeing friends and neighbors, talking about anything or nothing. It’s a very friendly environment, and by the time you get home it’s hard not to think about spending the rest of the day with important people. So why not go visit family? Wouldn’t that be the perfect day!

To sum up, on Friday if a person gets to go to Friday prayer, they will listen to something important and nice for sometime about religion and society, get the spiritual battery recharged, continue the prayer from the heart as a result, meet people, smile at people, get smiled at by people, and consider spending the day with the people that matter in the family, because family always matters. No wonder it’s considered a feast in the heavens: One Fine Day :)

A small confession

I have to admit, writing religious content has proven to be quite the challenge for me; mainly because I am not a scholar, I don’t attend lessons or read a lot of religious books as I try to strengthen my faith first by those tools which were instinctively given to us as human beings: prayer (salah), prayer (doaa), fasting, paying zakah, and most importantly, lots and lots of thinking. And also, because I believe that religion is a matter of having the heart and mind aligned so that when I perform my dues, I perform them with conviction and spirit.

When I wrote 7ay 3ala el salah, I got a mix of good and bad comments. The good comments were because it was from the heart and to the heart; I did not claim to be a scholar or even to be well read in religion, but I said what I feel about it and a lot of people related to it. The bad comments were because I was not well read in religion and subsequently, I was not adding much value to anyone by saying ay kalam. Nevertheless, this is a blog about my personal ideas concerning my personal faith, and even though I feel quite hesitant in continuing in these writings, I believe that if this is how I feel about religion and God, and God Almighty sees through my soul and knows all that I say here and understands my intentions and my beliefs and how I see Him in my soul, then I will not fear the ideas of others because they don’t have to read it or like it. I will not let myself be driven into the corner of guilt because my religion is lacking because I know it is, and I believe that everyone else’s religion is also lacking (on different levels of course), but it is our duty as human beings to search into our souls before searching into books and to understand and be convinced why we follow our faith and how we can contribute to it more without having the burden of guilt to weigh us down, as the burden of guilt will always be there since we will never worship God the way He should be worshipped.

7ay 3ala el Salah – Come to prayer

Everyone says that the single most important religious act is prayer. I stress on act because religion is a matter of the heart and acting is a matter of the world. we don’t pray in our heads or else life would have been so much easier, that’s because if prayer was in the heart and the head only, we’d all hear the Azan, and think “I’m praying now” and forget all about it. The fact that it’s an act is that it requires that we get up, do Wodou’, dress up in a certain way (for girls at least), stand in a certain way, and perform certain rituals that are the sub-actions of praying.

The actions of praying take energy and commitment. Energy because u have to get up and get down and go wash and all that, and commitment because u can go wash and then forget to pray, or get distracted by a phone call. Or even simply forget! So if a person is not committed to praying before actually praying, they won’t pray, will they?!

At some point in my life, I lost both the energy and commitment. I don’t know which was lost first, nor does it matter I think. The point is I stopped praying completely, and it was not easy getting it back without a certain train of thoughts that I am now sharing. So follow carefully.

First argument: there is no doubt that God created us and all that is around us, has bestowed upon us countless gifts, some we understand, others we don’t. So it would only make sense to do what God has asked us as a form of gratitude, or even paying a debt so to speak. If the price of what we have is to pray and fast and all that, then we should do it because we can see and hear and walk and have hands and legs and hearts that beat and brains that keep us alive.

Second argument: it is quite apparent that God does not do anything pointlessly -3abathan, then there is a certain value for praying that I just cannot grasp yet, and maybe if I pray with heart I’ll find it out. Will I pray to figure out the mystery of prayer? Probably not, but I trust God that prayer has some value to me and that value will be revealed to me when I pray with my heart rather than with my head.

Third argument: I love Allah, and I know that even though I may have not been the best follower, He loves me too. Like a parent who is too tired of their child’s mischief, they let them do what they want until they get tired of it and get back to the path on their own, their hearts filled with conviction. So I will do it for my Love, my God, even though I don’t necessarily feel like it. If I do something I’m not necessarily happy about because it would please the person I love on eath, wouldn’t I do something for Him who I love up in heaven?

Fourth argument: God is powerful and scary, so if I don’t pray out of respect for God as the highest power, or for all of the above, then I will pray out of fear of Him.

With that train of thought, I found out that the first thing I think about when I think about God is this utter conviction in His existence, in Islam, and that my salvation is with him and only him, and the absolute last thing was that God should be feared.

Isn’t Allah Grand? Allaho Akbar :)

The beginning of the journey

At some point, I lost my faith. I don’t mean I stopped believing in God or forgot His existence, I mean I became distant; doing any religious task had become a chore. I always felt there is a bond between a person and God, and through that bond a person can tell if God has mercy on them at that time or not. i really believe that mercy on earth is peace of mind and peace of heart. And I could tell that God has not granted me that peace. Through that bond, I felt God is punishing me for my sins by taking away my peace of mind and peace of heart, and to get all that back I am meant to go through a journey. I am writing this blog not because I have gone on that journey and completed it, although at some point I thought I did, but more to document it as I go. I’m not sure if I will ever get there but let’s hope so.

My hope is that by blogging, it will help me keep those ideas that light up my brain alive if I ever lose the light, and maybe it will light up my way and maybe help light someone else’s.