Your salat and your state
INsights 073, Friday 18th April 2025
Your salat and your state
INsights 073, Friday 18th April 2025
I’ve been really enjoying my salat recently.
So me being me, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why this has been happening.
During my reflections, it occurred to me that, over the last three decades, I must have prayed every kind of prayer.
Some of my prayers have been truly profound, meaningful, ecstatic, moments of utter transcendence.
I can remember some of them vividly and the fact that they happened at all gives me some hope.
Other prayers have been utterly lazy, distracted, hypocritical and yes, I’m ashamed to say, sometimes non-existent: just missed altogether for no good reason.
I think about these experiences and feel distraught.
Most prayers have probably been somewhere in between.
Amongst these, the highs and lows have occasionally existed within the very same prayer.
I have no objective way of knowing how my experience of prayer relates to everyone else’s.
But my guess is you can relate to most of what I’ve shared.
Your salat and your state
One thing that has occurred to me quite emphatically is as follows:
The consistency and quality of your prayer tells you everything you need to know about the reality of your relationship with your Lord at any point in time.
Not only is prayer the most important obligation in the life of the believer, it’s the biggest indicator of the nature and strength of your bond with God.
When we think about salvation, we often think in terms of our deeds.
But deeds are only helpful or otherwise to the extent that they reflect and affect our inner reality.
So beyond deeds, I find it even more helpful to think in terms of states.
Your salat reveals your state.
It tells you what you really think and feel about your Lord.
It shows you how close or far you are from Him.
In relation to this, here’s a thought that came to me again just yesterday:
We claim that we want to be in the presence of our Lord in paradise.
But we struggle to enter into, or be completely at peace in, His presence during our prayer.
To the extent that this mismatch exists, we know that there is work still to be done.
Questions to help you reflect
I invite you to consider a little more deeply your past, and especially your current, experience of prayer.
Here are some questions that I’ve been thinking about for myself and ones that you can use to provoke some reflections of your own, and perhaps use to discuss with loved ones and friends:
🤔 Do I look forward to praying or does it feel like a bit of a burden?
🤔 If prayer wasn’t an obligation, or if I didn’t believe that missing a prayer would incur divine punishment, would I still pray? What does my answer tell me?
🤔 When I recite The Opening (al-Fatihah) do I verbalise each phrase intentionally and experience the associated thoughts and emotions in a way that is consistent with the meanings of the words?
🤔 Is my choice of what to recite after al-Fatihah robotic and automatic or thoughtful and deliberate? What governs my choice?
🤔 Do I sometimes find myself completely absorbed and at peace in various positions of prayer? If so, why? If not, why not?
🤔 Am I rushing my movements between positions? If so, why?
🤔 If I’m missing prayers knowingly, what’s preventing me from them? Are my reasons justifiable?
🤔 If I’m rushing or feeling a little agitated in my prayers, what’s causing this to happen? Are my reasons justifiable?
I was going to say more but I think this is a good place to leave things for now.
In the next edition, God willing, I aim to share some key factors that have helped me of late.
Until then, please take the time to ponder, and feel free to reply or use the links below to share your reflections with me.
Also, I’ve decided to teach an updated, live online version of Transform My Prayer starting June latest, God willing. It will be freely available. So you can let me know if that would be of interest too.
If you can't wait, you can revisit or check out the on-demand version here.
Until next time.
Peace.
Iqbal
~~~
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