Fighting the Nafs in Prayer

In ṣalāh, this fight with the nafs is waged directly. As Imam Rabbānī relates, when the nafs is called to prayer it drags its feet and refuses to come. On one occasion, having called upon his own nafs to join him in worship and finding that it would not, he went without it, telling it plainly to be left behind — the nafs, he said, will never come of its own accord.

Shayṭān, for his part, will always use some trick to weaken a person's dīn and īmān, and he never runs short of them. His first objective is simply to stop a person from praying at all, for he knows what ṣalāh does to a believer and hates to see a Muslim in prostration, obeying Allah in the very act he himself refused. He works to produce every excuse he can, and the excuses glow depending on who is being tempted — excuses that no one else would ever think of except the person concerned and the Shayṭān working upon him. A plumber is offered a plumber's excuse; a housewife, what might be called a housewife's excuse; a student, a student's excuse; a businessman, a businessman's; a scholar, an ʿālim's excuse; an unlearned person, a jāhil's excuse. He has studied humanity since its beginning, and he knows every trick suited to every category of it — sizing up which kind of person stands before him, and choosing accordingly.