The Graduated Attack

Shayṭān uses a particular method, graded to the person. With one who is genuinely ignorant of his religion, he will first ask him to say words of shirk and kufr. A person who does not know may fall into such words and deeds, and be taken clean out of Islam without even realising it. If he cannot achieve this with a person who is genuinely ignorant, the next step is to make him feel good about his religion while inventing things within it — bidʿah. There is the account of a grandmother who had her own newly invented form of the basmalah: instead of Bismillāhi r-Raḥmāni r-Raḥīm, hers was "Bismillāhilmalim" — nobody knew what it meant, but it had, she said, come to her heart, and she liked it. No matter how sincere a person is, going around a particular tomb seven times does not make one a pilgrim: the performance of Hajj is fard, and such a circuit is nothing but bidʿah, kufr and shirk. Sincerity alone makes no difference — an act must first be compliant with the Sharīʿah. Knowledge is needed, and that knowledge must then be applied with sincerity.

If he cannot achieve bidʿah with a person, he will push toward kabāʾir, the major sins: drinking, zinā — "it is fine, Allah is Ghafūr al-Raḥīm" — theft, gambling, killing, disobedience to parents, lying, and so many others, over a hundred major sins in all, that he will try his best to draw a person into. If a person resists these too, by the grace of Allah, through īmān, knowledge and sincerity, he will try to induce the small sins, the ṣaghāʾir. As the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says in a hadith, no small sin remains small if persisted in, and no great sin remains great once forgiveness is sought for it. If a makrūh is excused as merely disliked, not forbidden, and practised again and again, that little seedling of makrūh becomes a great tree — some of the ʿulamāʾ and mashāyikh say that a makrūh repeated eight times running becomes a serious sin.

What begins this way is turned, without a person noticing, into a habit, and once it is a habit it becomes a real problem that he may spend the rest of his life trying to be rid of. Is smoking haram? — only makrūh, isn't it, whatever one likes to say — and that habit has killed a friend with cancer, caused a divorce between husband and wife, and left people unable to bear the smoker's company for the smell, and it all began with one little makrūh called a little white stick. Shayṭān comes in different disguises, always saying: it is only makrūh, Allah is Ghafūr al-Raḥīm, do not worry. If he cannot make a person commit even the small sins, he will occupy that person's time with what is merely permissible, mubāḥ — "I am collecting stamps" — when there are countless other things that could be done to help the community, skills that could be learned and put to use for others. Jogging, for instance, is mubāḥ: pleasant, healthy, good, nothing wrong in it.

Shaykh Maḥmūd Esad Coşan, may Allah have mercy on him, relates that his own uncle, in the town where he was born — a great friend of Allah, and himself a farmer — once saw a group of visitors from the city, on holiday in that small township, jogging every morning, five or six of them together. The first morning he watched them and said subḥānAllāh. The second morning, the same. On the third morning he stopped them and asked where they were going, what they were doing. We are jogging, they said, we want to be healthy. Have you lost your minds, he asked them, have you no sense? If you want to be healthy and fit, he told them, go and help that poor farmer over there — he needs ploughing done, digging done, work of every kind. Go and work the whole day in his field: that will make you fit, and it will make you useful.

It is mubāḥ, certainly, it is permissible — but there are better things to do, and Shayṭān works to keep a person from the better one, or, where two good things stand side by side, to settle a person for the lesser reward rather than the greater, the easier one. This is his method: to whisper, merely to suggest. If he cannot manage it by himself, he will use a person's weakest point — those closest and dearest — for both jinn and human devils do his bidding, and other people will come and persuade a person into what is forbidden: what is called, in modern terms, peer pressure. The closest friends are often the ones who lead a person into the worst of the forbidden. What kind of friend does that? Such people are not friends at all; they are asking for a person's destruction, whatever they may claim — "we're all doing it together, it's fun." Sin is indeed always fun; what follows it is Jahannam, and disobedience to Allah. "It's only a small sin" is no answer either: the question is not the size of the sin, but the One against whom it is committed. That is the question to ask oneself.