IBADAH IS FOOD FOR SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT

PUTRI INTAN HAZWANI IBRAHIM, 106320, Group 95

The first necessity for progression along the path of spiritual development is faith. The mind and heart of man should always be aware: Allah alone is His Master, Sovereign and Deity; seeking His pleasure is aim of all his endeavors; and His commands alone are the commands that are to obeyed. This should be a firm conviction, the stronger and deeper this conviction, the more profound a man’s faith will be.
The second stage is that obedience (it~ ’at), meaning that man gives up his independence and accepts subservience to Allah. This subservience is called submission. Thus, man should not only acknowledge Allah as his Lord and Sovereign but should actually submit before Him and fashion his entire life in obedience to him.
The third stage is that of taqw~ (Allah-consciousness). It consists in a practical manifestation of one’s faith in Allah in one’s daily life. Taqw~ also means desisting from everything which Allah has forbidden or has disapprove of; man must be in a state of readiness to undertake all that Allah has commanded and to observe the distinctions between lawful and unlawful, right and wrong, and good, and bad in life.
The last and the highest stage is that of ihs~ n (godliness) it signifies that man has attain highest excellence in words, deeds and thoughts, identifying his will with the will of Allah and harmonizing it, to the best of his knowledge and ability. Man should then not only avoid evil, for it displeases his Lord, but should use all his powers to eradicate it from the face of the earth. A man who reaches this stage attains the highest pinnacle of spirituality and is nearest to Allah.
In short, all your activities and your entire life are ‘ibadah if they are in accordance with the law of God, and your heart is filled with your fear, and your ultimate objective in undertaking all theses activities is to seek the pleasure of God. Thus, whenever you do good or avoid evil for fear of God, you are discharging your Islamic obligations. This is the true significance of ‘ibadah, (namely total important submission to the pleasure of Allah).
Prayer is the most primary and the most important of these obligations. And what is prayer? The prescribed daily Prayers which consist in repeating five times a day the belief in which you repose your faith. The various poses that assume during your Prayers are the very embodiment of the spirit of submission; the various recitals remind you of your commitments to your God. You seek His guidance and ask Him again to enable you to avoid His wrath and follow His chosen path. You dissociate yourself from your worldly engagements for a few moments and seek audience with God. Easy to understand how the daily Prayers strengthen the foundations of your faith. Prayers are also a symbol of equality, for the poor and the rich, the low and the high, the rulers and the ruled, the educated and the unlettered, the black and the white all stands in one row and prostrate before their Lord. Prayers also inculcate in Muslims a strong sense of discipline and obedience to the elected leader. In short, Prayers train them in all those virtues that make possible the development of a rich individual and collective life.
The second is the Fast which for a full month every year trains each man individually, and the Muslim community as a whole, in righteousness and self-restrain, it enables society, the rich and the poor alike, to experience hunger, and prepares people to undergo any hardships in their search to please Allah.
The third is the Almsgiving (zakat), which develops the sense of monetary sacrifice, sympathy, and cooperation among Muslims. There are people who wrongly interpret Zakat as a tax; in fact, the spirit underlying Zakat is entirely different from that of a tax. The real meaning of Zakat is sublimity and purification. By using this world, Islam seeks to impress on man the fact that, inspired by a true love of Allah, the monetary help which he renders to hid brethren will uplift and purify his soul.
The fourth is the Pilgrimage (Hajj), which aims at fostering that universal brotherhood of the faithful which is based on the worship of Allah, and which results in a worldwide movement that has been responding to the call of Truth throughout the centuries and will, Allah willing, go on answering this call till eternity.
The last is jihad, that is, exerting oneself to the utmost to disseminate the word of Allah and to make it supreme, and to remove all the impediments to Islam ¾ through tongue or pen or sword. The aim is to live a life of dedication to the cause of Allah and, if necessary, to sacrifice one’s life in discharge of this mission. This is the highest spirituality, rooted in the real world, which Islam wants to cultivate. Life-affirmation based on goodness and piety, and not life-denial, is what Islam stands for. And this lends a unique character to Islam.