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Prayer and the worst kind of theft |
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By Yasmin Mogahed, IFN Columnist
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Tuesday, 12 January 2010 |
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Page 2 of 2
When someone decides to abandon salah, they are also abandoning this protection. It is important to remember that this abandonment of salah often does not happen all at once, but rather in stages. It begins by delaying prayers out of their specified times and then combining one prayer with another. Soon it turns into missing the prayer altogether. Before you know it, not praying becomes the norm.
Meanwhile, something else is happening that cannot be seen. With every delayed or missed prayer, the human being relinquishes the protection Allah gave him or her against Satan or Shaytaan. Now Shaytaan can have full reign. Of this truth, Allah says: “If anyone withdraws himself from remembrance of (Allah) Most Gracious, We appoint for him an evil one, to be an intimate companion to him.” (Quran 43: 36)
So it should be of no surprise to anyone that neglecting salah becomes the very first step in the path to a lower life. Those who have fallen off the path need only to look back at where it began; and they will find that it began with salah. The same is perfectly true the other way around. For those who wish to turn their lives around, it begins by focusing on and perfecting the salah. Once you put salah back as the priority — before school, work, fun, socializing, shopping, TV, ball games — only then can you turn your life around.
The irony of this truth is that many people are deceived into thinking that they need to first turn their life around before they can start to pray. This thinking is a dangerous trick of shaytan, who knows that it is salah itself that will give that person the fuel and guidance necessary to turn his or her life around. Such a person is like a driver whose car is on empty but insists on finishing the journey before filling up on gas. That person won’t be going anywhere. And in the same way, such people end up in the same place for years, not praying and not changing their lives. Shaytan challenged them, and he won.
In so doing, we have allowed him to steal from us what is priceless. Our homes and our cars are so precious to us, that we would never think to leave them unprotected. So we pay hundreds of dollars on security systems to keep them safe. And yet our deen is left unprotected, to be stolen by the worst of thieves — a thief who has vowed God Himself to be our relentless enemy until the end of time, a thief who is not simply stealing some carved metal with a Mercedes symbol on it, but rather a thief who is stealing our eternal soul and everlasting ticket to Paradise.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 29 April 2010 )
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