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Tazkiyah

Third stage of purification

The heart and soul

Beyond the body and the mind there are sins invisible to the eye — and the book calls them extremely dangerous, because a person can commit them for a lifetime while appearing, to everyone including himself, to be doing well.

Other than the purification of the body, its organs and the mind, there are certain sins that are invisible. Nevertheless they are extremely dangerous, and can lead a person to the hellfire. Examples are envy, hatred, arrogance, ostentation, and excessive love of the world.

In the third stage these qualities are removed and replaced with superior ones: patience, gratitude, humbleness, love of Allah, and abstinence — the removal of the desire for the world from the heart.

Rows of clean blue aircraft seats, each labelled with a virtue: patience, servitude, gratitude, sincerity, humbleness
Every seat is a quality of goodness in one's characterp.88
The same aircraft cabin with seats burnt, torn and stained, each labelled with a vice: self-likeness, jealousy, love of Dunya, arrogance, pride
Some seats are ripped and torn — and their quality is the quality of Shaytanp.90

The mechanism of the whole stage

A person spends his whole life in one of four states

Before the seeker can be taught to remove the sins of the heart, he must understand the states a person passes through — so that when he is in one, he recognises it immediately and recalls how to react.

And there are only four: obedience, disobedience, blessing, and calamity. The claim the book then makes is a strong one. If a person in any of these states reacts in the correct way, he converts that state into a state of worship and blessing — which automatically abandons the evil desires and replaces them with goodness, leading to a life of purity, hayatan tayyibah.

In the state of

Obedience

React with humility, humbleness, servanthood and sincerity. The danger of obedience is not that it fails — it is that it makes you pleased with yourself.

In the state of

Disobedience

React with regret, shame, seeking forgiveness and repentance. The wrong reaction the book names is persistence upon the sin combined with hope in forgiveness.

In the state of

Blessing

Attribute the blessing to Allah, be thankful in the heart, and use the blessing according to the divine commands — not in disobedience. The wrong reaction is ingratitude: assigning the blessing to yourself.

In the state of

Calamity

React with patience, refraining from sin, and returning to Allah. The wrong reaction is simply impatience.
Every state, reacted to correctly, converts into a blessingp.91

Every state, reacted to correctly, converts into a blessing · p.91

A diagram of nested ellipses. At the centre four boxes: blessings, obedience, disobedience, calamity. Around them the right reactions — thankfulness above, patience below, repentance to the left, humility to the right — and every arrow leading outward to the word blessings on all four sides

There is no state you can be in from which the road does not lead back.

What is happening inside

The house of evil, and the troops of good

The book models the soul as contested territory. The ellipse is the soul, which can contain both good and evil. The evil traits inhabit a house firmly rooted in the ground, surrounded by its troops, protected from any foreigner.

At the start the soul is darkened, overtaken by the evil traits, very weak for lack of prayer and dhikr, and living in a sinful lifestyle. As a person tries to become pious, the troops of good traits are present but few in number, and the evil troops split due to their presence — becoming much weaker from retreat. Steadfastness on the Shariah, and the practices prescribed by the Shaykh, strengthens them further.

Then the good troops surround the surface of the soul to fight off any evil that leaks through. They build a protective shield. And finally the purified soul illuminates, and the good traits take complete repossession of the land of the soul — the soul lit from within with the light of Allah.

The third stage — the soul as contested ground, and how the ground changes handsp.90

The third stage — the soul as contested ground, and how the ground changes hands · p.90

Eight numbered ellipses tracking the soul as contested ground. It begins darkened and packed with the houses and troops of evil traits; then as the person tries to become pious a few troops of good traits appear; the evil troops split and weaken; the good traits build houses; the evil traits are weakened to half; the purified soul begins to dominate; a protective shield forms at the surface; and finally the purified soul illuminates with the light of Allah

Forty heavenly covenants

The graded practices of the heart

The third stage is worked through as a series of covenants, each with its own sheet and its own levels, each level held for thirty consecutive days. Three of them are set out in full in the book. Read them in order and you will notice they all end the same way.

Sincerity · Ikhlas · seven levels

Set out in full on the sincerity page — beginning with refreshing the intention at the start, middle and end of every major deed, and ending with the refusal to believe you have attained it.

Humbleness · Tawadhu · ten levels

  1. To think and believe that other Muslims are better than you, and not to consider them lowly or inferior.
  2. To clear any animosity or hatred towards enemies that exists for worldly reasons — especially family members and close friends.
  3. In reaction to every good act you perform, attribute it to Allah. It is through His grace and mercy that one is able to perform it. All knowledge of good and bad was revealed by Allah through our Master Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and Allah provides the space, the time, the intellect, the body and the mind through which the deed is performed. So in reaction to a good deed, do not develop self-likeness or arrogance, or think yourself superior — show more humility and servitude towards the creation of Allah.
  4. Practically show humbleness towards Allah, towards the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, towards the Deen of Allah, and towards Muslims.
  5. Now to perform khidmah — service. Whenever you are sitting with brothers, or in a gathering, help in any way you can: opening doors, preparing food, making tea — with happiness, and for the pleasure of Allah.
  6. When seeing anyone — elderly, young, middle-aged, men or women — pray for them from the bottom of your heart. If it is a young Muslim boy, pray that he becomes pious and marries a pious woman. If it is an old non-Muslim woman, pray that she becomes Muslim and dies with faith.
  7. To believe: all the goodness and blessings of excellence do not belong to me, nor am I their creator — they are a gift from Allah, without my deserving them. Just as the images on a television screen, or in a mirror, are not the creation of the mirror, and the mirror cannot say that it owns them.
  8. To believe: I am still trying to achieve humbleness, and will keep trying and striving until death. Not to consider that I have achieved humbleness — because that is attributing a lofty station to yourself.
  9. To believe: I cannot worship Allah as He deserves to be worshipped, and I cannot fulfil the rights of Allah as He deserves for them to be fulfilled.
  10. To believe: I am not even serving Allah, and His Deen, to the extent of my full abilities and capacity.

Gratitude · Shukr · seven levels

  1. When any blessing of goodness is bestowed upon you, physically and spiritually attribute it — mentally and verbally — to Allah, the bestower of blessing. Do not attribute it to yourself, your abilities and your skills, while forgetting the One who gave the mercy.
  2. When in any calamity or problem, try to see Allah's hidden blessing and message in it, and focus on the positive side — because in that calamity there will be hidden blessings from Allah. Do not become agitated and forget Him.
  3. When you see calamities around you, in your area or in other countries, see the blessing in it and the positive side — because in that calamity there will be hidden blessings, lessons and messages from Allah.
  4. Consider the blessings you have been given in your life — socially, environmentally, financially, from the worldly point of view.
  5. Think about how you can share all of those blessings with others, and practically begin doing so for the pleasure of Allah.
  6. To believe: I am still trying to achieve the station of shukr, and will keep trying and striving until death. Not to consider that I have achieved it — because that is attributing a lofty station to yourself.
  7. To ponder and reflect: am I using any of the blessings of Allah in His disobedience? — especially in relation to the first three stages.

Abandoning the sinful life · five levels

  1. To please the people whose rights have been violated, by returning what is due to them and asking for forgiveness.
  2. To abandon the company of impious and evil people.
  3. To abandon and cut the means which lead one to sins — instruments, places, television, the internet, and so forth.
  4. To abandon the sinful lifestyle in relation to clothing, eating and socialising, whilst replacing them with the prophetic lifestyle.
  5. To abandon the sin both inwardly and outwardly. Outwardly by simply leaving it and no longer committing the action. Inwardly by avoiding sinful thoughts, and by not deriving any pleasure or happiness from sins committed in the past. One should not wish to carry out that sin in the future — or one will return to his previous ways.

The pattern is deliberate. In every one of these ladders, the highest rung a person is permitted to claim is that he is still climbing. The book closes humility, gratitude and sincerity with almost identical words, and the effect is to make the summit unreachable by design — which is the only safe design, because a person who believes he has arrived at humility has just lost it.