Every single one of us is in need of the mercy and forgiveness of Allah ﷻ. All of us are guilty of some sort of mistake, sin, poor choice, shortcoming, or act of disobedience. We all have our own personal faults, shortcomings, and weaknesses. The pull of the world, the dunya, temptations, desires, and wants, is extremely powerful. The struggle is real. The Prophet ﷺ told us,

“Every single son of Adam is a profuse wrongdoer. And the best of profuse wrongdoers are those who repent frequently.”1

Meaning, not only do we as human beings sin, but we sin a lot. We sin publicly and privately, knowingly and unknowingly, big and small.

The Importance of Seeking Forgiveness

Although we may not realize it, these sins have a direct impact upon our hearts. The Messenger of Allah ﷻ said,

‏“‏ إِنَّ الْعَبْدَ إِذَا أَخْطَأَ خَطِيئَةً نُكِتَتْ فِي قَلْبِهِ نُكْتَةٌ سَوْدَاءُ فَإِذَا هُوَ نَزَعَ وَاسْتَغْفَرَ وَتَابَ سُقِلَ قَلْبُهُ وَإِنْ عَادَ زِيدَ فِيهَا حَتَّى تَعْلُوَ قَلْبَهُ وَهُوَ الرَّانُ الَّذِي ذَكَرَ اللَّهُ ‏:‏ ‏(‏ كلاَّ بَلْ رَانَ عَلَى قُلُوبِهِمْ مَا كَانُوا يَكْسِبُونَ ‏)‏ ‏”

“Verily, when the slave (of Allah ) commits a sin, a black spot appears on his heart. When he refrains from it, seeks forgiveness and repents, his heart is polished clean. But if he returns, it increases until it covers his entire heart. And that is the ‘Rān’ which Allah mentioned: ‘Nay, but on their hearts is the Rān which they used to earn.’”2

The Prophet ﷺ himself, the one who is free from sin, would seek forgiveness from Allah ﷻ seventy times a day. According to another narration he would do so 100 times a day. He ﷺ did so to show us the importance of constantly turning back to Allah ﷻ and asking Him for forgiveness. The Prophet ﷺ said,

“Glad tidings for the one who finds abundant istighfār in his record of deeds.”3

طُوبَى لِمَنْ وَجَدَ فِي صَحِيفَتِهِ اسْتِغْفَارًا كَثِيرًا ‏”‏ ‏.‏

Sayyid al-Istighfār

The Prophet ﷺ taught us a very beautiful, powerful, and profound way of seeking forgiveness knows as Sayyid al-Istighfār. From Shaddād ibn Aws who said that the Prophet ﷺ said, “The greatest invocation for seeking forgiveness is that a servant says:

اللهم أنت ربي، لا إله إلا أنت، خلقتني و أنا عبدك، و أنا على عهدك و وعدك ما استطعت، أعوذ بك من شر ما صنعت، أبوء لك بنعمتك علي، و أبوء لك بذنبي، فاغفر لي، فإنه لا يغفر الذنوب إلا أنت.

“O Allah, You are my Lord! None has the right to be worshipped but you. You created me and I am Your slave, and I am faithful to my covenant and my promise (to You) as much as I can. I seek refuge with You from all the evil I have done. I acknowledge before You all the blessings You have bestowed upon me, and I confess to You all my sins. So I entreat You to forgive my sins, for nobody can forgive sins except You.”

‏”‏ وَمَنْ قَالَهَا مِنَ النَّهَارِ مُوقِنًا بِهَا، فَمَاتَ مِنْ يَوْمِهِ قَبْلَ أَنْ يُمْسِيَ، فَهُوَ مِنْ أَهْلِ الْجَنَّةِ، وَمَنْ قَالَهَا مِنَ اللَّيْلِ وَهْوَ مُوقِنٌ بِهَا، فَمَاتَ قَبْلَ أَنْ يُصْبِحَ، فَهْوَ مِنْ أَهْلِ الْجَنَّةِ ‏”‏‏.‏

The Prophet ﷺ said, “Whoever says this during the day with firm faith in it and dies on the same day before the evening, he will be from the people of Paradise. And whoever recites it at night with firm faith in it and dies before the morning, he will be from the people of Paradise.”4

The Prophet ﷺ termed this particular duʿā Sayyid al-Istighfār because it is the absolute best and most comprehensive way of asking Allah ﷻ to forgive our sins. Through these words, we are reconfirming our commitment to Allah ﷻ, acknowledging His Lordship over us, humbling ourselves before Allah ﷻ, expressing gratitude for the blessings He has given us, apologizing for our shortcomings, and asking Him for forgiveness. And the Prophet ﷺ is telling us that if we say this duʿā in the morning and happen to pass away, we will be from the people of Paradise. If we recite this duʿā in the evening and happen to pass away, we will be from the people of Paradise.

This is a duʿā that all of us should memorize and make part of our daily morning and evening routine. And most importantly, this is a duʿā whose meaning we should understand at a deeper level.

We start this beautiful supplication by first calling out to Allah ﷻ, acknowledging that He is our Rabb. “O Allah, You are my Lord!” The word “Rabb” is usually translated as Lord. However, this translation doesn’t do this word justice. Lord sounds very strange and archaic; it is associated with kings, knights, and folklore. Al-Rabb means the Master, the Owner, the One Who arranges all matters, the Nurturer, the Sustainer, and the One Who takes care of His subjects. Allah ﷻ is the owner of this entire universe and everything it contains. That means He owns us and we are His slaves and servants. As our Owner, He ﷻ cares for us, ensures our growth, maintenance, well-being, and looks after all of our affairs. He ﷺ alone is the One who looks after us and takes care of us throughout all of our difficulties and hardships. Allah ﷻ is our Rabb, the One Who created us, nurtures us, teaches us, cares for us, and the One we can turn to in any situation for help, aid, support, and assistance. We open this duʿā with this very profound recognition and acknowledgement; that I have a Lord I can always turn to and rely upon. “O Allah, You are my Lord!”

“There is no deity except You.” There’s absolutely no one and nothing worthy and deserving of worship, submission, devotion, and obedience except for You. Allah ﷻ and Allah alone is worthy and deserving of our worship, submission, devotion, and obedience.

“You created me and I am Your slave.” We then remind ourselves that Allah ﷻ alone is the One Who created us and brought us into this world. He is that One who brought us into existence from non-existence; the One Who shaped and fashioned us in the most perfect, balanced, and beautiful way possible giving us the ability to listen, see, feel, smell, speak, and think. He alone is the Creator and Originator of this entire universe and every single thing it contains. We also remind ourselves that we are His slaves. We remind ourselves that we have been created only to worship Him. We and everything we own belongs to Allah and Allah alone and we are subject to His rules, instruction, guidance, commands, and prohibitions. This is a profound declaration of our relationship with Allah ; affirming that He is our Lord and Creator and that we are His slaves and servants.

“And I am faithful to my covenant and my promise (to You) as much as I can.” With this statement, we are reminding ourselves of our covenant with Allah and our promise to Him. As soon as we say the shahādah, we have entered into a covenant – an agreement – with Allah ﷻ to live our lives according to His divine guidance and rules. It is a promise to try our best to fulfill our responsibilities towards Him and others through obeying His commands and staying away from His prohibitions. But we realize that we are weak, that we have weaknesses, shortcomings, and faults. That is why we say that we are going to be truthful and faithful to our promise to the best of our abilities.

And because we will definitely make mistakes we say, “I seek refuge with You from all the evil I have done.” We are asking Allah ﷻ to protect us and save us from the consequences of all the evil we have done. To provide us safety, shelter, and refuge from the harms and negative consequences of sins and acts of disobedience.

“I acknowledge before You all the blessings You have bestowed upon me…” We are being taught how to express gratitude to Allah ﷻ. We recognize and acknowledge that every single blessing we have is from Allah ﷻ. Our īmān, health, wealth, well-being, families, children, careers, the ability to pray and worship, everything is from Allah ﷻ and Allah alone. We are reminding ourselves to be grateful to Allah ﷻ morning and evening.

“…And I confess to You all my sins.” We are humbling ourselves before Allah ﷻ confessing to all of our sins – big and small, public and private, known and unknown, intentional and unintentional. The first step to earning forgiveness from Allah ﷻ is recognizing and acknowledging our sins.

We then conclude this beautiful and powerful duʿā by asking Allah ﷻ to forgive us. “So I entreat You to forgive my sins, for nobody can forgive sins except You.” That is why this duʿā is called Sayyid al-Istighfār; the leader of seeking forgiveness. Reciting this duʿā with faith and conviction morning and evening is a ticket to Paradise.

 

Related:

I Don’t Know If Allah Will Forgive Me

Small Deeds, Massive Rewards : Have All Your Sins Forgiven

1    Tirmidhī, k. ṣifah al-qiyāmah wa al-riqāq wa al-warʿ ʿan rasūlillah, 24992    Tirmidhī, k. tafsīr al-Quran ʿan rasūlillah, 33343    https://www.ahadithexplained.com/hadith-glad-tidings-in-book-of-deeds-due-to-forgiveness/#:~:text=%D8%B7%D9%8F%D9%88%D9%92%D8%A8%D9%B0%D9%89%20%D9%84%D9%90%D9%85%D9%8E%D9%86%20%D9%88%D9%91%D9%8E%D8%AC%D9%8E%D8%AF%D9%8E%20%D9%81%D9%90%D9%8A%D9%92%20%D8%B5%D9%8E%D8%AD%D9%90%D9%8A%D9%92%D9%81%D9%8E%D8%AA%D9%90%D9%87%D9%90%20%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%92%D8%AA%D9%90%D8%BA%D9%92%D9%81%D9%8E%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%8B%D8%A7%20%D9%83%D9%8E%D8%AB%D9%90%D9%8A%D9%92%D8%B1%D9%8B%D8%A7%20%E2%80%9CGlad,this%20is%20an%20authentic%20hadith%20from%20Ibn%20Maaja.4    https://sunnah.com/bukhari:6306

The post From The Chaplain’s Desk: Sayyid Al-Istighfar – The Greatest Dua For Seeking Forgiveness appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Leading progressive calls on voters to back Biden.

Interim ruling boosts international efforts towards justice for Palestine.

Susan Akram, director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University’s School of Law, in discussion about the implications of the World Court ruling.

Attacks on cemeteries add to Gaza's grief.

Little face in the rubble! 

If you could speak

From your midget-coffin, 

If your sweet voice could carry through

Your little mouth-

Cavernous and hollowed out by death,

Encrusted with old blood, 

Stopped in its tracks between pearly new teeth

That once shone when your face blossomed into smiles;

Or enlivened with laughter

Over some little silliness, some little surprise-

 

Those little things, before scary big things took over-

Big feuds between little people

Unable to see the faces in the rubble-

Blinded, insensate… 

 

 If you could speak

From beneath the settling dust of oblivion

Falling, falling quietly over hearts-

 

You’d speak of

When the sky flared up with fires-

Malevolent and blind- as they rained Death,

Leaving a trail of bloodied corpses

And shell-shocked mourners.

And often, battered little bodies-

Timorous and traumatized-

Confounded by unanswered questions.

 

You’d speak of

The desperate, endless waiting

For a healing hand-

Perhaps your mother’s keffiyeh to cling on to;

Her warm breath to reassure

“It’ll be all right”…

But the breath was cold,

The hand lifeless and brittle.

 

You’d speak of

The stinging, deep pain

Of a disconsolate helplessness,

And the terrifying abyss of cruel questions

Hulking all around you,

Pressing upon your battered self,

Confounding your infantile senses.

 

You’d speak of

How Death took so long to reach

As you writhed in your own blood… 

 

Yet when She reached, Her touch strangely familiar

In its maternal, Messianic embrace, 

As it spread its gentle wing

Soaring above and beyond

Where pain cannot reach-

Onward and upward, 

To ‘The Home of Peace’ 

That you were promised… 

 

If you could speak-

Your voice would resound… 

“If only my people knew…” [The Noble Quran; Surah Yasin – 36:26] 

 

If you could speak-

The Verdict would ring loud-

An eternal, scathing indictment

Writ large into the very heart

Of the eternal universe… 

“Yaa hasrat an al all ibaad” (Alas for mankind!) [The Noble Quran; Surah Yasin – 36:30] 

 

If you could speak-

The layered silences

Over the tiny mound of earth

That shrouds you

Would be ripped through

By the still, small voice…

 

Piercing, shattering, tearing, shuddering…

To ask of us

An overwhelming question-

‘For what crime was I slain? [The Noble Quran; Surah At-Takwir – 81:9]

 

Related:

– Standing With Palestine: A Poem

– 6 Quranic Reflections On The Current Situation In Palestine

The post If You Could Speak : A Poem appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

“World will bear witness to untold thousands of preventable deaths” if hospitals collapse in Gaza’s south, Red Cross warns.

The Ukrainian flag flying outside Lambeth Town Hall, Feb 2023 (source: Lambeth Council).

Last night the Green party group on Lambeth borough council in south London tabled a motion to the full council meeting calling for, according to My London (a website containing stories from local papers owned by Reach, formerly the Mirror Group), “an immediate ceasefire and the end to human rights atrocities in the Israel/Palestine conflict”. Pro-Palestinian protesters in the council’s public gallery unfurled Palestinian flags and were expelled from the gallery shouting “shame on you” as the Labour-dominated council rejected the motion (though two Labour councillors rebelled and voted in favour). Last night the Labour group issued a statement, posted as an image without alt-text on X (Twitter), claiming that the motion regarding “the ongoing tragic conflict in Israel and Gaza” was “divisive” and “sets a false narrative that Lambeth Council — a civic institution — has the power or influence to affect an international conflict”.

This patronising statement (of course councillors know that a local council has no direct influence on an international conflict) stands in contradiction to Lambeth council’s stance during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The council building in Brixton was lit up in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, blue and yellow, in February 2022 and flew the Ukrainian flag outside the building in August that year. In both 2022 and 2023, at the start and on the anniversary of the start of the invasion, Lambeth council issued statements of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. The council also supported residents who allowed Ukrainian refugees to stay in their homes. Local councils have often passed statements regarding conflicts beyond their borders, as have other organisations such as trade and student unions. They are, of course, not binding on the parties involved, but large numbers of such resolutions tell aggressors and oppressors that the eyes of the world are on them and their victims that they are not alone.

Lambeth Labour do, of course, get their views across in this statement, so it’s disingenuous to claim that local councillors have no place taking positions on an international issue. “The attacks on Hamas on 7th October 2023 were horrific and we utterly condemn them”, they proclaim. Why? It’s nothing to do with Lambeth council, right? They then bemoan “the escalation of violence and conflict in the region since [which] has led to a humanitarian crisis which has brought with it an unimaginable loss of life with Palestinian civilians having been killed and displaced, despite the demands the international community made of the Israeli government”. Only one side is identified as having committed an atrocity; the rest is just “an escalation of violence” as if this was just a succession of street fights or indeed a war between equally armed forces, as opposed to a slaughter overwhelmingly aimed at civilians where a third of the victims have been children, or indeed as if there had been no Israeli violence against Palestinians before 7th October.

Nearly 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the Israeli attacks on Gaza. All of the Gaza Strip’s hospitals have now been destroyed, such that amputations and Caesarian sections have had to be carried out without anaesthesia, as have all of Gaza City’s mosques. We are aware of journalists and doctors and their families having been targeted obviously on purpose. A university was destroyed with mines (which would have been impossible if it was being used by Hamas, the standard Israeli excuse for destroying civilian buildings) after its artefacts were looted. Gaza’s public record office has been destroyed, making it impossible to fully record the genocide’s casualties, and depriving the survivors of the record of their existence as well as such things as their educational qualifications. Aid has been stuck at the border, with Israeli mobs attacking trucks as they try to enter and Palestinian civilians shot at and bombed as they try to access aid. Over the past week we have seen people use animal feed to make bread, picking out maggots from it first. Snipers have targeted obviously unarmed civilians, including women with children and people holding white flags. Scholars of genocide have called this a textbook genocide, based not only on the nature of the attacks but on the statements made by Israeli officials including their prime minister.

There’s nothing divisive, or should be, about demanding an end to genocide, to the slaughter of a population with weapons supplied by western powers, including the UK, in the full knowledge that they will be used to murder civilians. It does not matter if the attitudes fuelling the Israeli slaughter of Palestinian civilians is shared by sections of the community here, or it is considered good for business or geopolitically convenient. Labour’s cowardice on this issue stems from its craving for respectability following the 2019 election defeat, but there is nothing respectable about cheering on mass murder. For Lambeth Labour to condemn the Hamas attacks, the facts of which are disputed, on the basis of merely accepting Israel’s version of events while refusing to condemn the much better documented mass murder of 25 times as many Palestinian men, women and children is not to remain neutral or avoid causing division. It is a show of approval for the genocide of the people of Gaza.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Ask a loaded question …
• Thanks Wes, but take a stand on Gaza!
• On condemning the Gaza genocide without mentioning Hamas
• Zionist censors come for another student leader
• I was there (at the demonstration)

Israel has inflicted massive destruction on my relatives in northern Gaza.

“Do they shell the stars?”

Shop will be open only to non-Muslim diplomats – but some fear it is first step to wider availability of alcohol in teetotal kingdom

The news that Saudi Arabia will allow its first alcohol shop has citizens and foreigners alike mulling one question: is this a minor policy tweak, or a major upheaval?

Sources familiar with preparations for the store disclosed details of the plan on Wednesday, as a document circulated indicating just how carefully leaders of the teetotal Gulf kingdom will manage its operations.

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Day 110 with guest Helena Cobban on geopolitics (13:26); Gaza news with Nora Barrows-Friedman (:39); new revelations about 7 October with Asa Winstanley (44:38); Ali Abunimah responds to Washington Post’s lies (1:02:27); and Jon Elmer with the latest on the resistance (1:27:15).

Gaza is a dress rehearsal for violence that threatens workers and the oppressed everywhere.

US Palestinian teen killed following shots from settler and Israeli troops.

More than 20 soldiers killed while planting explosives to establish “buffer zone.”

Plans have not only been canceled or postponed, planning for the future has stopped entirely.

Many who praise a headteacher for preventing Muslim prayers are oddly sanguine about the number of faith schools in Britain

Schools are too often the crucible in which social conflicts are fought out, with teachers expected to put right whatever we fail to fix in the world outside. Religion is one such battleground, where “values” are set by education secretaries, and of whom there have been 10 in the past 14 years.

The latest row blew up in Michaela Community school in Brent, north-west London, Katharine Birbalsingh’s notorious free school, regimented to her direction. The discrimination case brought by a Muslim girl last week stirred up rightwing commentators devoted to the headteacher, who made her name condemning education under Labour as “broken”.

Continue reading...

Students and faculty are pushing back and building power.

India's prime minister inaugurated a new temple at the site of a demolished 16th-century mosque that was torn down by a mob of Hindu nationalists. Babri Masjid was destroyed in 1992 during a rampage that killed 17 people in the city of Ayodhya. The new Ram Mandir temple was built atop the ruins of the old mosque, where some Hindus believe Lord Ram, a popular deity, was born. The event on Monday drew 8,000 guests including celebrities but also forced members of the local Muslim community to relive old traumas

• Modi inaugurates Hindu temple on site of razed mosque in India

• As petals rained down and celebrities beamed, Modi unveiled his vision of a Hindu India

Continue reading...

Israel controls every aspect of life in Gaza, even the internet.