Bismihi Ta’la
Greetings John!
Du’a’ or supplication' is closely connected to dhikr, such that it is often difficult to make a distinction between the two. The term means literally to call upon’ and it is commanded by the Qur’an in several suggestive verses, including the following:
Supplicate your Lord humbly and secretly; He loves not transgressors. (7:55)
Supplicate Allah or supplicate the All-merciful. Whichever you supplicate - to Him belong the most beautiful names. (17:110)
Supplicate God, making your religion His sincerely, though the unbelievers be averse. (40:14)
Your Lord has said: `Supplicate Me and I will respond to you. Surely those who wax too proud to worship Me shall enter Gehenna utterly abject.’ (40:60)
And when My servants question thee concerning Me - I am near to respond to the supplication of the supplicator when he supplicates Me. (2:186)
Perhaps the most devotional manual on supplications is the Sahifa al Sajadiyya, by the fourth Shi’ite Imam, Zayn al Abidin that you can access at www.al-islam.org/sahifa also known as the Psalms from the ahlul bayt (household of the Prophet).
The Prophet related that God says: `O My servants, all of you are misguided except him whom I guide, so ask Me for guidance, and I will guide you. All of you are poor except him whom I enrich, so ask Me for riches, and I will provide for you. All of you are sinners except him whom I release, so ask Me to forgive you, and I will forgive you.’
The Prophet said: `Supplication is the weapon of the man of faith, the centrepole of religion, and the light of the heavens and the earth.’
Ali was asked: Which speech is best in God’s eyes?’ He replied: `A great amount of dhikr, pleading (tadarru’), and supplication.’
Ali said: Four things work to a man’s benefit and not against him: faith and thanksgiving, for God says: What would God do with chastising you, if you are thankful and have faith? (4:147); asking forgiveness, for He says: God would never chastise them with thee among them; God would never chastise them while they prayed forgiveness (8:33); and supplication, for He says: My Lord esteems you not at all were it not for your supplication (25:77).
Husayn said: `The Prophet used to raise his hands when he implored and supplicated, like a man in misery begging for food.’
Imam Muhammad al-Baqir said: `God loves nothing better than that His servants ask from Him.’
In short, supplicating or calling upon God is to address Him with one’s praise, thanksgiving, hopes, and needs. It is `prayer’ in the personal sense commonly understood from the term by contemporary Christians. It forms a basic part of the religious life, but like dhikr, though commanded by the Qur’an in general terms, it does not take a specific form in the injunctions of the Shari’a because of its personal and inward nature. Everyone must remember God and supplicate Him, but this can hardly be legislated, since it pertains to the secret relationship between a human being and his or her Lord. The salat, however, is the absolute minimum which God will accept from the faithful as the mark of their faith and their membership in the community. Its public side is emphasized by the physical movements which accompany it and the fact that its form and contents are basically the same for all worshipers, even if its private side is shown by the fact that it can be performed wherever a person happens to find himself. In contrast dhikr and supplication are totally personal.
But the private devotional lives of the great exemplars of religion often become public, since they act as models for other human beings. The `sunna’ of the Prophet is precisely the practices of the highest exemplification of human goodness made into an ideal which everyone should emulate, and the supplications which the Prophet used to make are part of his sunna. When he recited them aloud, his Companions would remember and memorize them. They also used to come to him and ask him for supplications which they could recite on various occasions and for different purposes.
Though many of the supplications which have been handed down from the Prophet and the Imams were certainly spontaneous utterances of the heart, others must have been composed with the express purpose of reciting them on specific occasions or passing them on to the pious. Most of the prophetic supplications are short and could easily have been recited on the spur of the moment, but some of the prayers of the Imams - such as Zayn al-'Abidin’s supplication for the Day of 'Arafa (no. 47) - are long and elaborate compositions. Even if they began as spontaneous prayers, the very fact that they have been designated as prayers for special occasions suggests that they were noted down and then repeated by the Imam or his followers when the same occasion came around again.
Naturally it is not possible to know the circumstances in which supplications were composed, but we do know a good deal about early Islam’s general environment which can help suggest the role that supplication played in the community. Many Muslims, no doubt much more so than today, devoted a great deal of their waking lives to recitation of the Qur’an, remembrance of God, and prayer. Even those who left Mecca and Medina to take part in the campaigns through which Islam was spread or participate in the governing of the new empire did not necessarily neglect spiritual practices. And for those who devoted themselves to worship, supplication was the flesh and blood of the imagination. It provided a means whereby people could think about God and keep the thought of Him present throughout their daily activities. It was an intimate expression of tawhid or the `profession of God’s Unity’ which shaped their sensibilities, emotions, thoughts, and concepts.
In the Islamic context, supplication appears as one of the primary frameworks within which the soul can be moulded in accordance with the Divine Will and through which all thoughts and concepts centered upon the ego can be discarded. The overwhelming emphasis in the Sahifa upon doing the will of God - `Thy will be done’, as Christians pray - illustrates clearly a God-centeredness which negates all personal ambitions and individual desires opposed in any way to the divine Will, a Will which is given concrete form by the Shari’a and the sunna. For Muslims then as today, obeying God depended upon imitating those who had already been shaped by God’s mercy and guidance, beginning with the Prophet, and followed by the great Companions. For the Shi’ites, the words and acts of the Imams play such a basic role in this respect that they sometimes seem - at least to non-Shi’ites - to push the sunna of the Prophet into the background.
The companions of the Imams constantly referred to them for guidance, while the Imams themselves followed the Prophet’s practice of spending long hours of the day and night in salat, dhikr, and supplication. Though much of this devotional life was inward and personal, the Imams had the duty of guiding the community and enriching their religious life. As Imam Zayn al-‘Abidin emphasizes in the Treatise on Rights', translated in the appendix, it is the duty of every possessor of knowledge to pass it on to others, and the Imams were acknowledged as great authorities of Islam by their contemporaries, Sunni and Shi'ite alike. Hence it was only natural that they would compose prayers in which their knowledge of man's relationship with God was expressed in the most personal terms and which could be passed around and become communal property. Many if not most of the supplications recorded in the Sahifa seem to be of this sort. A few of them, such as His supplication for the Day of Fast-Breaking’ (46) or `for the Day of Sacrifice’ (48) seem to have been composed for public occasions. One of them provides internal evidence to suggest that the Imam had in mind his followers rather than himself: in the supplication for parents (24), he speaks as if his parents were still alive, whereas this could hardly have been the case, unless we suppose that he composed it in his youth before the events at Karbala’.
No one with any sensitivity toward human weakness and God’s love can fail to be moved at least by some of the supplications contained in the Sahifa. Here we have one of the greatest spiritual luminaries of Islam so overawed by the sense of God’s goodness, mercy, and majesty as to express his utter nothingness before the Creator in terms that may seen surprisingly explicit for one deemed by his followers to be the possessor of such holiness. In the Sahifa we see Islamic spirituality - or that dimension of the religion of Islam which deals with the practical and lived reality of the personal relationship between man and God - expressed in the most universal of languages, that of the concrete and intimate yearning of the soul for completion and perfection.
Muslim ideas and attitudes go back to tawhid or the profession of God's Unity' as expressed in the first half of the shahada: There is no god but God.’ This is the essence of the Qur’anic message, as Muslim authorities have affirmed and reaffirmed throughout Islamic history. The Sahifa provides a particularly striking example of what this means in personal, practical terms, not in the abstract language of theology or metaphysics. The basic theme of the Sahifa can be put into a series of formulas simply by taking every positive human attribute and placing it within the context of the shahada: There is no goodness but in God', There is no repentance but by God’s grace’, There is no gratitude but through God', There is no patience without God’s help’, There is no knowledge but in God', There is no love except through God’s initiative’. The complement of this perspective is that every negative attribute belongs to the human self: There is no evil but in me', There is no pride but in myself’, There is no impatience but in my own ego', There is none ignorant but me’, `There is no hate but in myself.’
Later authorities frequently cite the first prophet and his wife, Adam and Eve, as Qur’anic examples of this attitude of self-deprecation demanded by the shahada. When Adam and Eve had disobeyed their Lord’s commandment, they said: Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves' (7:23). In contrast, Iblis - who personifies the tendency in the human soul to pride, self-centredness, and heedlessness said to God: Now, because Thou hast led me astray…’ (7:16). The prophetic attitude is to ascribe any evil, sin, error, stumble, slip, fall, inadvertence, negligence, and so on to oneself, while the satanic attitude is to ascribe these to God or to others. To suggest that God is responsible - certainly a temptation in the Islamic context where the stress on the Divine Unity tends to negate secondary forces - is the epitome of discourtesy and ignorance, since it is to deny one’s own self precisely where it has a real affect upon the nature of things: where evil enters into the cosmos.
In short, the shahada means in practice that the worshiper is nothing and God is all. Everything positive that the servant possesses has been given to him by God, while every fault and imperfection goes back to the servant’s own specific attributes. If he has patience in adversity, this was given by God, but if he lacks it, this is his own shortcoming. If he knows anything at all, the knowledge was bestowed by God’s guidance and mercy, but if he is ignorant, that is his own limitation. If he possesses a spark of love in his heart, God has granted it, but every coldness and hardness belongs to himself. Every good and praiseworthy quality - life, knowledge, will, power, hearing, sight, speech, generosity, justice, and so on - is God-given. Only when this fact shapes a person’s imagination and awareness can he begin to see things in their right proportions and be delivered from his own self-deceptions.
From the beginning of Islam, supplication has been one of the fundamental modes through which Muslims actualized the awareness of correct proportions and trained themselves to see God as the source of all good. In its great examples, as typified by the Sahifa, supplication is the constant exercise of discernment by attributing what belongs to God to God and what belongs to man to man. Once this discernment is made, man is left with his own sinfulness and inadequacy, so he can only abase himself before his Lord, asking for His generosity and forgiveness.
Those familiar with the writings of the later spiritual authorities may object that the perspective of supplication as just described deals with only one-half of Islamic spirituality, leaving out the theomorphic perfections which the friends of God (awliya’) actualize by following the spiritual path. Granted, on the one hand man is the humble and poor slave of God, possessing nothing of his own. But is he not - at least in the persons of the prophets and friends - God’s vicegerent (khalifa) and image (sura)? In fact, this second perspective is implicit in the first, since the more one negates positive attributes from the servant, the more one affirms that they belong to the Lord. By denying that the creature possesses any good of his own, we affirm that everything positive which appears within him belongs only to God. To the extent that the servant dwells in his own nothingness, he manifests God’s perfections. This point of view is made rather explicit in the famous hadith qudsi in which God says: My servant continues drawing near to Me through supererogatory works [such as supplication], until I love him, and when I love him, I am the hearing through which he hears, the sight through which he sees, the hand through which he grasps, and the foot through which he walks.' But the early Islamic texts leave the mystery of union with God’ or `supreme identity’ largely unvoiced, since it is far too subtle to be expressed in the relatively straightforward terms which characterize these texts. In any case, identity is alien to the perspective of supplication, which keeps in view the dichotomy between Lord and servant, a dichotomy which remains valid on one level at least in all circumstances and for all human beings, even in the next world.
According to various hadiths, the Prophet used to pray for forgiveness seventy or one hundred times a day by repeating the formula `I pray forgiveness from God’ (astaghfiru llah), a formula which is pronounced universally by practicing Muslims. Muslims hold that all prophets are sinless, and the Prophet Muhammad is the greatest of the prophets, yet no one has ever seen any contradiction between his asking forgiveness and his lack of sins. One easy but shallow way of explaining this is to say that the Prophet was the model for the whole community, so he had to pray as if he were a sinner, since all those who followed his sunna and recited the prayers which he taught would be sinners. But to say this is to suggest that he was a hypocrite of sorts and to lose sight of the meaning of the shahada.
Christians have never doubted Christ’s divinity because he said: Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone' (Mark 10:18). Here, in Christian terms, is a concise statement of the shahada as applied to the lives of God's creatures. In as much as anything can be called created, it is other than God’ and less than absolutely good. God is possessor of mercy, knowledge, love, life, power, will, patience, and so on - the ninety-nine names of God' provide a basic list of the divine attributes. If something other than God’ possesses any of these attributes, it clearly does not possess them in the same way that God possesses them. They belong to God by the fact that He is God, but if they belong to the creatures in any sense, it is by His bestowal, just as the creatures have received their existence through His creation.
This basic teaching of the shahada means that nothing and no one - not even the greatest of the prophets - stand on a par with God. Since goodness is a divine attribute, None is good but God alone', and everything other than God is evil at least in respect of being other’. Evil' here may be another name for lesser good’, and no one in the Islamic context would dream of attributing evil to the prophets. Nevertheless, the prophets in as much as they are human beings cannot be placed on the same level as God. The respect in which human beings differ from God is all important for the spiritual life. It is man’s clinging to the difference his own servanthood, his own createdness, his own inadequacy, his own sinfulness - which allows him to fulfill what is required of him as the creature of his Lord. Just as the Prophet is first abduhu, His servant’, and only then rasuluhu, `His messenger’, so also every human being must first actualize the fullness of his own servanthood before he can hope to manifest anything on behalf of his Lord.
The greater a person’s awareness and knowledge of God, the greater his awareness of the gulf between the I' and the Divine Reality. As the Qur'an says: Only those of His servants fear God who have knowledge (35:28). The greater the knowledge of God and self, the greater the understanding of the claims of independence and pride that are involved with saying I’, and so also the greater the fear of the consequences. Those nearest to God fear Him more than others because they have grasped the infinite distance that separates their created nature from their Creator; hence also they are the most intense in devotion to Him, since they see that only through devotion and worship can they fulfill His claims upon them. No Muslim can think that he has reached a point where he no longer has need for God’s forgiveness, so no Muslim can stop praying for it. Moreover, the overriding goodness of God and the nothingness of the creatures demands that a pious act can never belong to the servant. To the extent that a human being is able to do what God wants from him, this is because God has granted him the power to do so. The well-known formula wa ma tawfiqi illa bi-llah, `I have no success except through God’, is of universal application. In the last analysis, no good act can be attributed to the servant - the merit is always God’s (for example, Supplication 74.2). It is here that the mystery of God’s ever-present and immanent reality manifests itself, such that there is nothing left of the creature but a face of God turned toward creation.
If the Prophet and the Imams constantly prayed for forgiveness with the utmost sincerity, this does not contradict the idea that they were sinless', since the sins envisaged here entail a willful disobedience to the divine command, not the creaturely sin’ of being other than God. Later authorities invariably distinguish among levels of sinfulness as also among levels of virtue, a doctrine epitomized in the oft-quoted saying, The good qualities of the pious are the bad qualities of those brought near to God' (hasanat al-abrar sayiyyat al-muqarrabin). At least three basic levels are distinguished for every positive human quality, though these levels are not exclusive and may coexist in various degrees within a single person depending upon his spiritual maturity. The examples of repentance’ (tawba) and `asking forgiveness’ (istighfar) can illustrate these points.
In the Sahifa the Imam often asks God for success in repentance, which may be defined as turning toward God through acts of obedience and avoiding disobedience. The later authorities speak of a first level of repentance belonging to the faithful in general, who sin by breaking the commands of the Shari’a and who repent by asking God to forgive their sins and trying their best not to repeat the sin. In other words, their repentance pertains basically to the level of the activities governed by the Shari’a while the forgiveness they seek means that they ask God to pardon any act of commission or omission which is contrary to the Shari’a.
On the second level of repentance there are those who have dedicated their lives to God and spend their waking moments in careful observance of the details of the Shari’a and following the recommended acts of the sunna. Such people, who might be called the pious' in keeping with the above saying, have no difficulty following the practical commands and prohibitions of the Shari'a, so they turn their attention toward the inward attitudes which should accompany the outward activities. They repent of the heedlessness (ghafla) of their own souls, which are unable to remember God with perfect presence. They see their acts of obedience as falling short of the ideal because of their inward weaknesses and the various forms of blindness and hypocrisy which Satan is able to instill into their hearts, such as the temptation to ascribe their piety and diligence in observing the Shari'a to themselves. They repent not of sinful acts, since they observe the Shari'a with exactitude and do not sin’ according to the Shari’ite definitions. Rather, they repent of inappropriate thoughts and intentions and ask God to forgive these whenever they occur.
The third level is that of those brought near to God'. They have passed beyond outward and inward sins, since they see nothing but God's will, guidance, and mercy in every act and every thought, but they are still faced with the greatest of all barriers, that of their own self, the supreme veil’ between man and God. God has given them knowledge of Himself and of themselves, so they have come to understand that the `I’ can never be totally innocent or sinless. They repent of their own inadequacies as creatures and ask forgiveness for their own existence as separate beings.
Western readers may object that there is something artificial about this division of repentance' into levels. How can one repent’ of one’s own existence? How can one ask forgiveness for something which is not one’s own fault? These objections might be valid if the texts had originally been written in English, but in fact the objection arises because of the difficulty of translating the concepts of one religious universe into another. The original Arabic words translated as repentance' and forgiveness’ convey meanings far broader than the English terms, both of which are connected with a sentimental and moralistic sense of guilt. (Similar problems, it should be remarked, exist with much of the terminology which is normally used to translate Islamic texts and which has also been employed - because there is no other real choice - in the present translation of the Sahifa.)
The word tawba or repentance' means literally to turn’ or return' from one thing to another. One of God's Qur'anic names is al-tawwab, He who turns’, and the verb from this root is used both for God’s turning toward man and man’s turning toward God. Man’s `repentance’ refers to every level of turning away from self and towards God; it makes no difference whether the self is conceived of as a tissue woven of sins or as the veil of ignorance and heedlessness that pertains to one’s creaturely situation. There may be a moralistic sense attached to the word in a particular context, and there may not.
In a similar way, maghfira in Arabic is far richer than the term forgiveness' in English. To begin with, the Qur'an attributes three different divine names to God from this root, al-ghafur, al-ghaafir, and al-ghaffar, and subtle distinctions are often drawn to differentiate the different modes of forgiveness’ which they imply. More importantly the root meaning of maghfira is to cover over', to veil’, to conceal'. Hence the Forgiver’ is He who veils human sins and inadequacies. In Arabic the literal sense of saying I pray forgiveness from God' is I ask God for concealment.’ Most people may understand that they are asking God to conceal their sins', but those brought near to God’ will see that they have need for the concealment of something much deeper and more radical since it is inherent to every created thing.
When the Prophet or Imam Zayn al-‘Abidin ask God to forgive their sins, they are perfectly sincere in this request, but this does not necessarily imply that their sins lie at the same level as our own. As Islamic texts frequently remind us, qiyas bi l-nafs, judging others by one’s own self’, is always misleading, especially if the others happen to have been the recipients of God’s special favours.
Regards
Abbas
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