21. TRUE OBEDIENCE IS COMPLYING WITH ALLAH’S COMMANDS AND AVOIDING HIS PROHIBITIONS
Allah, the Most High, is closer to His slaves than their jugular veins, yet He defined the relation between Him and His slaves to be like how a person deals with a person far away from himself.
He ordered His slaves to visit His House (in Makkah) and raise their hands to ask Him for what they want. The hearts of the ignorant sense the distance and so they fall in sins because if they were mindful of Allah’s presence as if they could see Him, they would have abstained from sins.
In contrast, the heedful ones know that He is close to them and so they become mindful of Him and that makes them refrain from transgressing His boundaries.
If they were not been made incapable of seeing Him in reality in this life, they would have not stretched their hands to consume a single bite of (haram) food or refrained their eyes from looking at anything wrong.
The latter meaning manifests in the words of the Prophet when he said, “My heart sometimes becomes absent from the remembrance of Allah.”
Whenever a person is mindful of Allah, amiability is present because amiability occurs when obedience is maintained, while disobedience calls forth insipidity. Conforming to Allah’s Commands makes those who are affable with Allah’s company to rejoice. It is truly a great pleasure with which the affable live and a great loss for the gloomy ones!
Obedience of Allah is not as what most of the ignorant presume, thinking it is about praying and fasting (only). It is in fact to abide by Allah’s entire Ordinance i.e. performing all of His Orders and abstain from all of His Prohibitions.
This is the foundational and principle rule! Many worshippers happen to be far from Allah, despite their worship because they neglect this great principle and oppose the rules of religion by opposing the orders and committing the forbidden.
The one with sound understanding who investigates the truth is he who holds the forehead of his own accountability (muhasaba) and starts putting him into account. Therefore he performs what Allah orders and avoids what Allah forbids. If he was blessed enough to perform optional acts of worship, that will be good, otherwise it will not harm him not doing so.
(Source: al-Hafiz Abu’l-Faraj ibn al-jawzl [d. 597AH] “CAPTURED THOUGHTS being” a translation of his masterpiece ‘Sayd al-K hatir)
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