Faith. What is it?

According to one of the eschatological hadiths, the Prophet ﷺ said, paraphrasing, that among the first things to leave the Ummah is khushūʿ: inward stillness, reverence, humility, and presence before Allah in prayer. Why? To be present in prayer requires us to become still enough, while we are alone, to truly be alone before Allah. No audience. No performance. No one to convince. The heart must gather itself from everything that has dispersed it and become one before the One. But our desires have become dispersed. We are distracted, divided, pulled in a hundred directions, tethered to a hundred things. And when īmān weakens, the heart begins attaching itself everywhere, seeking from creation what it has forgotten to seek from Allah. The Prophet ﷺ did not fear that his Ummah would return to worshipping idols after him. What he warned us about were the subtler forms of association that enter the heart. There is an irony here. Certain scholars concerned primarily with the outward sciences have criticized the Sufi masters for their attention to the inward sciences, while the work of those masters was precisely to examine these subtle movements of the heart: What do I secretly depend upon? What possesses my attention? What do I fear losing? What do I believe has power over me? Where does my heart turn before it turns to Allah? And the realized masters of this path were never strangers to the outward sciences. In fact, the awliyāʾ are awliyāʾ precisely because they have mastered both the outward and inward sciences. It is time to find your anchor. الصلاة والسلام عليك يا كامل النور الصلاة والسلام عليك يا وجه السرور #Gnosis #Sufism #Tasawwuf #Irfan