A while ago I was with a Shaykh and he told us a funny little story, with a lot of depth to it.
One day a young man came to him and asked, “Shaykh, please give me a zikr to do that will heal my heart”. (A ‘zikr’ is a formula of divine remembrance; akin to a ‘mantra’ in other traditions).
The shaykh said to him, “Okay, continuously repeat ‘la ilaha ila-Allah’”
(Which means, “there is no deity, only Allah” – and it’s the most basic precept of the Islamic faith).
In reply the young man said, “No, no, that’s too basic. Give me something else.”
The Shaykh then looked at him and said, “If you go to a doctor with a disease, and she diagnoses you, then she prescribes for you a medicine that will heal your condition, do you say to the doctor, ‘no I don’t want that one, give me another medicine’?!”
Sometimes the best possible advice is the simplest.
Sometimes the deepest truths are the simplest.
Sometimes you don’t need something complex to fix your issue, just a healthy dose of common sense, (aka. divine wisdom).
The Shaykh then said to us, that we should all say, “la ilaha ila-Allah” until we literally taste the sweetness of it on our tongues.
In my book, Inside the Soul of Islam, I explain that the real depth of this formula hit me on a much deeper level, when I realised that everything in our lives that we believe has the power to cause our feelings – whether it’s a person, a situation, a problem, a challenge, a material possession, our past, or anything – is actually an ‘ilah’ (idol) in our minds.
We turn that thing into a psychological idol the moment we believe it has the power to cause our feelings.
The reality is that only the God-given power of thought in the moment has the power to cause our felt experience.
So, if you want to be like Abraham, peace & blessings be upon him, and smash down all the idols in your life, and in your mind, then take your sledgehammer, and go here to join our live idol-smashing event, based on the book:
www.mamoonyusaf.com/event
