بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Friday Sermon
HAZRAT KHALIFATULLAH AL-MASSIH AL-MA’UD
Munir Ahmad Azim
26 November 2010
(19 Dhul Hijjah 1431 Hijri)
(Summary of Friday Sermon)
After having greeted everybody with the Salutations of Peace, the Messiah (Massih’ullah) read the Tashahhud, Taouz and Surah Al Fatiha and then he said:
When Allah takes the righteous believer by the hand and guides him, the latter leaves behind him the fight he has waged against distractions. Through His book, Allah the Most High makes him advance to the stage where prayer is to him as necessary as food. The righteous derives from prayer the same pleasure that one would clearly seek delicious and appetizing food when hungry.
Now that Salat was transformed into an indispensable need for him, he can no longer do without it and in fact, without prayer, he does not feel well and he is greatly disturbed.
When he practices it, Salat gives him a pleasure and an ineffable solace, of a kind unknown in the world in general. Through prayer, he begins to feel love for God.
As his Salat never ‘falls’ but remains ever “upright”, he no longer needs to straighten or lift it. His new status, which is natural to him, now makes it so that his will is intertwined with that of Allah, the Most High. The love he feels for God and the devotion he showed Him no longer require any effort on his part, for now, this all becomes natural and easy for him. He derives from Salat such a pleasure which is more intense than when others indulge in great food or when they derive satisfaction from certain desires.
Thus, prayer is the means by which we can grow spiritually, and it has been described as the ‘Miraj’ (ascension to the spiritual climax) of the believer. We should practice it correctly, the best way possible. Within Islam, thousands of people have reached the highest levels of spirituality, how have they done to achieve this? It is through the observance of prayer. The Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) said: “I reach ecstasy during prayer.” Verily, upon reached this stage, one experiences in prayer, the most intense of pleasures, and the words of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) that I just mentioned are just referring to that pleasure.
So remember that the phrase, “they recover and put upright the Salat”, is of interest to this stage where the worshiper must strive and fight to observe prayer, as if he had to perform a chore. Then the Holy Quran leads him to the stage where prayer becomes a pleasure for him. And remember that the righteous mentioned in the sentence “... ‘A direction’ for the righteous ...” are at the spiritual the stage of the reproachful soul that blames itself.
In its later stages, the soul passes through three stages; the first stage being the soul Instigator of evil, then that of the reproachful soul who blames itself and afterwards that of the soul at peace. In the first stage, the soul is inclined to disobedience, feeling repugnance for virtue, against which it rebels. Moving from there, it passes to the next step, that of reproachful soul who blames itself. During this last stage, when a person commits something wrong, he feels remorseful, he begins to reprimand himself and pay special attention to virtue. He cannot however completely overcome the propensity to evil and sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes he fails.
This struggle will continue until such time when the grace of God will come to his aid, and will make him succeed. Then he will be able to overcome any tendency to evil. Once this is done, the righteous believer moves to the third stage, that is, the soul at peace.
We can compare these different phases to the steps of a conflict between two states and one of the two (the right one) emerges victorious, where he will remove all the trouble so as to restore peace and security. We are witnessing a complete reversal of the situation compared to existing conditions in the first step.
As stated in the Qur’an:
“Verily, when powerful rulers invade a country, they humiliate and sacked its leaders.”
The previous regime was overthrown, its chiefs were arrested and humiliated, and a great revolution changes everything. Similarly, when a spiritual regime changes, everything is reversed. Satan and his cohorts are arrested, and the evil tendencies, causes of disturbances in the spiritual world, are removed and a new spiritual system is introduced. Therefore, all is peace and security. We find ourselves by the grace of God now at the stage of the soul at peace, because there is no more conflict (internally speaking – in our obedience and love for God). The war is over and a new regime came to power. Now, God reigns over the heart and He established His throne. That is the perfection of the soul. May Allah give us the Tawfiq to understand this sermon and we must all make regular prayers to Allah to guide us on the right path. Insha-Allah. Ameen.
