Noesis Institute

As life rapidly escapes us with time passing ever so quickly, we can barely catch up. Consequently, many of us get in the habit of procrastinating on all things spiritual, tabling worship until we have more free time. This all too prevalent backburner approach to spirituality is causing one pillar of Islam to be oppressed in overwhelming numbers, the salah. What’s ironic is the rationale behind the oppression. We’re seeking comfort and success, financial achievement and happiness in our exhaustive efforts that leave no time for prayer while Allah says in Surah Ta Ha (20:124), “Whoever turns away from My remembrance – indeed he will have a depressed life.” Between the wished for dreams that we hope to accomplish and fulfilling our nafs’ desires, we forget that the true essence of happiness is being with Allah.

Those who pray on time and five times per day never experience the sickness, failure, depression, negativity, lack of confidence, isolation, loneliness, you name it, to the degree of those who don’t pray. They’re not smiling from the outside while donning the best of clothes and flashing their riches to mask troubled hearts and nightmarish existences; faking and claiming what isn’t real. Skeptics question whether it’s salah that makes a difference or could meditation, yoga, etc., serve the same purpose? Of course, it’s salah. A person can meditate or pray, like the people who worship stone idols, and attain some peace that salah affords however, there is a heavenly state of happiness that will never be achieved unless God does His part. And God’s involvement cannot be secured in any non-heavenly prayer or meditation. Furthermore, all human invented forms of focus and worship are merely just that while Islam’s salah is a well-designed, rich and meaningful story that represents much. Salah makes the human focus and concurrently elevates the mind and nurtures the soul, eliminating psychological obstacles that cannot be overcome any other way.

Allah says in Suratul Isra (17:9), “Verily this Quran doth guide to that which is most right (or stable), and giveth the Glad Tidings to the Believers.” The Quran never denied that there are other ways to pray, but they are limited, short, failing, incomplete, and lacking. Compare salah to the food Muslims are permitted to eat. Animals being fed the meat and bones of other animals known as biofeed or something of that sort in English and Jal-La-Lah in Arabic, are haram to Muslims until such animals eat grass and are cleansed for a good number of days, some say 21 and some say 40. Other nations criticized these limitations until they learned from experience that eating chickens that eat cows, sheep, etc., for example, led to the emergence of mad cow disease, swine flu, etc. It took human suffering and death to finally come to what Allah said. In this same way, some people have tried to escape depression in just meditation only to later discover its limitations, then search for a more meaningful meditation only to come to meditate the way Allah designed, because salah is best.

It is not the same engaging in what is right compared to what looks right, yet the arguments continue, and the Divine promise continues: the human will only know truth as he lives and suffers, if he refuses to listen to his Lord who saves him time and gifts him true wisdom. So try to avoid procrastinating in your prayers, missing them, and seeking to fill the void elsewhere because you only delay your own happiness. In time, without salah, people dry and become dead like the tree that is not watered. It looks like a tree from a distance but has no leaves, and no fruit, ready to collapse at any time.

-MT