The Polish of the Heart

In a further hadith, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) teaches that hearts, like iron, become rusted over time — not merely dusted, but rusted through. Asked what polish, what jilāʾ, might remove that rust and cleanse the heart, he — the Physician of Hearts, the foremost of the messengers — prescribed two medicines: the recitation of the Qur'an, and remembrance of death. These two together — tilāwat al-Qurʾān and reflection upon one's own mortality — cleanse the heart. Left untreated, the love of this worldly life and the ordinary business of daily existence gradually numb the heart through what enters it by the eyes, the ears, the tongue and the run of one's own thinking, until it feels nothing at all: no repentance, no response, no feeling even within worship. Reversing this heedlessness, this ghaflah, requires exactly these two disciplines practised regularly. In yet another hadith, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) states that everything has its polish, and the polish of the heart is remembrance of Allah, dhikru Llāh, practised regularly and grounded in the Qur'an and Sunnah.