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UNDERSTANDING ISLAAH (SELF REFORMATION) AND ITS IMPORTANCE- Part one

Allah sent us into this world as a test. But the major part of our test is lLIVING and not formal worship. We must earn a living, eat, satisfy our sexual needs, socialise, sleep and live in so many other ways. Formal Ibaadat such as Salaat, fasting, tilaawat of Quraan, etc. form a small percentage of our lives. The idea is that we must LIVE proper lives as Muslims and human beings.


Now if we read the Quraan for 5 Minutes an allocate 30 minutes for 5 Salaat combined, make 2 minutes of some form of zikr for 2 minutes we will find that we will spend less than 1 hour of our entire day in formal Ibaadat. So is this what is expected from us from our creator in a 24 hour day?
In this article we will focus on the basics and the starting point of islaah. Says Allah, “Successful is the one who purifies themselves. We live in a rat race world and never have time for this and think that it is out of our reach.


Let us all make an intention and then follow this up with some effort to do the following:
- Establish our five Salaat on time every day. If we analyse the time required it is an average of 7 minutes per Salaat (if we do it in a quick manner). But we will try to form an aadat (habit). This aadat will become an Ibaadat (worship) with time. If for some reason we miss a Salaat let us catch up with qaza before we sleep.
- Let us take TWO MINUTES of the day to recite Quraan by looking and reading. This translates to anywhere from a quarter page to 1 and half pages depending on our ability to recite. We should look at the clock and stop after two minutes even if we just manages 2 lines.
- Let’s us take one minute to recite some zikr with concentration. To say Alhamdulillah takes a second so we can praise Allah sixty times a day through this one minute. We can also try to recite tasbih e faathimi instead. (33 times subhaanallah, 33 times Alhamdulillah and 34 times Allah Akbar. This will take us less than 100 seconds or roughly just over a minute.
- Take ONE MINUTE of the day to make Dua and ask Allah for your needs or just pour your heart out to Him.

Combine the above and we have a total time of around 45 minutes of the day for formal Ibaadat. This is time we can all find and also it is broken up over the day so we won’t feel it.
You see, shaytaan and our nafs convinces us that there is no time and make these little acts with little time seem like a huge and impossible task.

Then further let us analyse our lives and take one good action such as maybe spending 5 minutes extra listening to our spouse our children, or joking with them or getting in the habit of complimenting people or containing anger or doing some stretching exercises or smiling…anything… and try and implement it in our lives daily. We all know ourselves, so pick something that can improve your life for the better, but pick one a be constant with it on a daily basis.
Then we will take one sin or bad habit and remove it from our lives or at the very least cut it down and ask Allah for forgiveness. Things like rudeness, vulgarity, laziness, lying, gheebat, porn…anything! Once again we know ourselves and we should choose one thing but again be constant daily.

Now we will do this for 6 weeks without adding or subtracting from it with constancy. Remember no matter how busy we are, we find time to eat, go toilet and shower. So we CAN find the time for these big things that take little time (very little time) and this will create a contact with our creator insha ALLAH.

After six weeks we will have created a habit in this insha Allah. If not we will try for another six weeks. If we feel we got our habit formed we will add one more good action and subtract one more bad action for another six weeks and so on, but without losing the original six week habit.

Insha Allah this little “exercise” in the modern, 21st century, rat race will be the start of becoming better Muslims and even more …better human beings.

The above is Haq and we should make a go for it insha Allah.