The Heart as a Mirror

The third kind of cleanliness is the cleanliness of the heart, which is likewise farḍ — free of any form of kufr, any form of shirk, any false belief, and free of all the forms of akhlāq radhīlah, the base attributes a human nafs can carry. Where these are present, a doctor is needed for them — a shaykh, a spiritual master capable of teaching what cannot be reached alone, least of all in the case of the heart. Tawbah and istighfār suffice for the smaller matters; dhikrullāh too; but the deeper work needs real guidance.

The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says that when a person commits a sin, trespasses the boundaries Allah (swt) has set, transgresses one of His laws — a deliberate act of defiance against the law of Allah (swt) — a dot, a stain, is placed on the heart of that Muslim. Where tawbah is not made, that stain simply remains. A big blotch of curry on a white jalabiyyah, never taken to the laundrette, never taken home to be cleaned, while more curry is eaten uncontrollably, one plate after another after another — that white jalabiyyah ends up, in the end, nothing but a patch of curry stains from top to bottom. Hearts are exactly the same. The heart is nothing but a mirror, a clean mirror, through which the asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusnā, the tajalliyāt of Allah (swt), can be perceived — and if a heart is constantly stained with sin, with deliberate acts of disobedience toward Allah, it becomes a dark spot: dark, dark, dark, the mirror growing completely dark — until, and refuge is sought in Allah (swt) from this, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says it becomes sealed altogether.

The duty, then, is to keep the heart constantly clean, to polish it constantly — as set out under the obligation of constancy in the remembrance of Allah, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says li-kulli shayʾin ṣiqālah: everything has something that polishes it, and the polisher of the heart is dhikrullāh, the remembrance of Allah (swt).

A claim sometimes heard runs along these lines: my heart is clean — better, even, than the heart of someone who prays five times a day; prayer may be set aside, fasting may be set aside, because the heart itself is already clean. Such a claim invites its own obvious answer: was it Ajax that washed this heart? Which detergent, exactly, produced this cleanliness, exactly, so that it might be shared with everyone — shaken out a little, jumped up and down over, and the whole business pronounced done — sparing the mujāhadah, the struggle, that everyone else troubles themselves with? No such detergent exists. Was the pure heart of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) somehow dirtier than this, that he had to pray five times a day, and five more again on top of that — tahajjud, ḍuḥā, ishrāq, awwābīn — that he fasted almost every second day, every third day, every Monday and Thursday and the ayyām al-bīḍ, the white days; that he gave so much ṣadaqah, did so much ʿamal ṣāliḥ, and abstained from everything Allah (swt) had forbidden — all of that, because his heart needed it — while a heart that claims to need none of it calls itself cleaner than his? Such a claim is not enlightenment; it is delusion, plain and simple — a mind seeing things that are not there, no different from a stone where understanding ought to be, blind and deaf to the very comparison just drawn. What it calls for, more than anything, is a return to one's senses.