Paradise Forever

Even as a Jew in New York, I know what it is like to be Muslim in France. While studying abroad in the French city of Strasbourg in 2007, I decided to grow a bushy beard. Little did I know that in France only traditional Jewish and Muslim men don anything but the most finely trimmed moustache or goatee. Since I did not wear a yarmulke or other head covering, people who saw me on the street assumed that I was Muslim.

I felt that police officers and passersby treated me with suspicion, and even on the crowded rush hour bus few chose to sit next to me if they could avoid it. On one occasion someone followed me home and tried to start a fight, only to discover that I was a bewildered American, not a French Muslim.

Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali On Bringing The Heart To Presence During Prayer

The great Hanbali scholar of the 7th century hijri mentions in his work titled Al-Kusoo’a  fi Al-Salah a priceless gem of advice:

It is obligatory on any one intending to pray, to free his heart – according to his best ability- from those worldly things that occupy him and whatever is related to those things before  entering  the prayer. When a matter becomes important to you, your heart automatically becomes engaged in it automatically. There is no cure to remove ones heart from such [worldly] matters except by turning ones attention towards the importance of the prayer. The level of turning one’s attention [towards prayer] varies according to the strength and weakness of one’s faith in the hereafter, and their level of disdain for worldly life.

Thus, whenever you see that your heart is not present in prayer, then know that the reason is due to weakness in faith [Iman] and so it is obligatory on you to strive towards reviving it.

Translated by Abdus Shakur Brooks

The following is a defence of the Ash'ari school by one of the foremost scholars of Hadith and Fiqh in Makkah at the moment - Shaikh Sayyid Muhammad Alawi al-Maliki al-Makki.

Shaykh Muhammad 'Alawi Maliki: "Many sons/daughters of Muslims are ignorant of the Ash'ari School, whom it represents, and its positions on the tenets of the Islamic faith (aqidah), and yet some of them are not God-fearing enough to refrain from accusing it of deviance, departure from the religion of Islam, and heresy about the attributes of Allah. The ignorance of the Ash'ari school is a cause of rendering the unity of the Ahl al-Sunnah dispersing its ranks. Some have gone as far as to consider the Ash'aris among the categories of heretical sects, though it is beyond me how believers can be linked with misbelievers, or how Sunni Muslims can be considered equal with the most extreme faction of the Mu'tazilites, the Jahmites.

"Shall We deal with Muslims as We do criminals? How is it that you judge?" [Qur'an 68:35-36]