10 Steps to Perfect Faith

Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim - In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful!

Firstly, my heart felt condolences to four: To Bibi Fatima (AS) on the death of her father; so hard it must have been to have to give permission to the angel of death to come into your house to take the soul of the most purified Prophet of Allah! To the Aimmah (AS) and the family of the Holy Prophet (SAW). To the people from the Ummah of the Prophet who are saddened by this heartbreaking event. And finally, the sincerest of my condolences to the Imam of our time (ATF).

In a lecture given by Sheikh Shahnawaz Mahdavi, the problems faced by our Holy Prophet were conveyed in a very analytical manner which covered some fine aspects of how much the Holy Prophet loved Islam. He began by saying that when something is free, we tend to minimize its worth, and neglect it. We do this with our faith as well, where as the Holy Prophet (SAW) used so much effort to bring Islam to us, that he is qouted to have said that he was troubled the most compared to all other Prophets of Allah!

6 main methods of the Quraysh were highlighted, including firstly the calling of names such as Madman and Magician, when that didn't work, there was disgracing the character by attributing false wrong deeds to the Holy Prophet. Then when people were still turning to Islam they even tortured the followers, and the next stage was the boycott of Banu Hashim, which lasted for three years, but still after the three years, Islam was getting stronger. This left them with little choice, either to imprison the Holy Prophet, drive him to exile or kill him. They decided that even in prison and exile he would still convert people to Islam so they decided to kill him, and that was when he was forced to migrate to Yathrib(Madina).

After all these failed they still tried to stop the message of Islam by using military power, where in the battle of Khandak, 10,000 men were sent to Yathrib and they also had inside influence of the remaining Jews within Yathrib. But alas, it was to no avail, and this victory made the Muslim empire a superpower of the time! So as a final blow the evil people decided to stop Islam from the inside by pretending to accept Islam and gaining power then destroying it's principles. And these people have been given the worst of punishments in hell, they are known as the Hypocrits!

With all this trouble which was faced by the Holy Prophet, he had struggled so hard that we still have Islam today, if it was not for his great determination to spread the true message, it would have been corrupted by this time, but we find more than 1400 years later there is still the perfect religion among us!

The verse quoted in the beginning is from sure Baqarah verse 177, and the Holy Prophet has said that whosoever acts up to this (one) verse has attained perfection in faith. This is because it conveys the "practical" piety in a clear and distinct manner. Belief in God and benevolence towards mankind have been outlined as the essence of this perfect religion, and no man can argue with the correctness of that!

It is interpreted by some commentators that the turning of the faces towards the east and the west refer to an aspiration for the conquest of the countries in these directions which is not the aim or the purpose of the Islamic faith. Rather the aim of this perfect religion is the attainment of virtue. For this process of attaining virtue; in accordance to the tafsir(commentary) in the translation by S.V. Mir Ahmed Ali, it is written that there are 10 conditions highlighted by this verse:

1st condition: Faith in ONE GOD!
2nd condition: Faith in the Day of Judgment
3rd condition: Faith in the Angels
4th condition: Faith in the Holy Book (Qur'an)
5th condition: Faith in the Prophets of God
6th condition: Spending from your wealth for the love of God; with the following preferences,
A) Nearest Relations
B) Helpless Orphans
C) Poor
D) Helpless Wayfarers
E) To liberate captives or slaves
7th condition: Keeping up the prescribed prayer
8th condition: Paying the prescribed poor rate
9th condition: Fulfilling all the promises you make
10th condition: Being patient in times of distress and in times of conflict

Thus Zuhair's View:
All these conditions prescribed to us within this verse would be noted by any intelligent reader as being superb qualities to adopt into anyone's life.
To complete the post today I would like to send salutations on the man who brought to us this great religion and worked so hard to keep it alive throughout his entire life:
"ALLAHUMA SALLI ALA MUHAMMADIN WA AALI MUHAMMAD!!!"

This post is as always open to any criticism and comment. May Allah(SWT) guide us all to the straight path, upon which are the purified ones and away from which are the wrong doers, and unjust.