The meaning of “La ilaha illa Allah” according to these herders is “no god is greater than our god, our god is better than your god” and they insidiously inject this idea to the Muslims, obstructing the Rasul’s (saw) call for contemplation and covering the most magnificent source of knowledge under the guise of “god’s book of commands” and rendering it dysfunctional….
What else can I say…
The Rasul of Allah (saw) invites us to the experience of salat and instructs us, “you are the vicegerents of earth”!
While we are busy entertaining ourselves with how robots bow and prostrate, the Quran invites us to thought and contemplation, with the words of Allah’s Rasul and Nabi Abraham (pbuh):
““My Rabb, make me an establisher of salat (of those who experience the return of introspectively turning to the reality of the Names) and also from my descendants (create establishers of salat)!”[1]
Salat is the pole of religion. It is the ascension of the believer. It is a magnificent experience of consciousness. It is far beyond physical movements. Those who haven’t discerned the reality of “La ilaha illa Allah” cannot comprehend what salat actually encompasses. Those who haven’t recognized the One referenced with the name Allah can never even ponder on the meaning of the Akbariyyah of HU!
Those who have been robotized and thus whose faculty of thought has been suspended cannot say “B-ismi Allah” just as they can never recognize the Rahman and the Rahim.
Salat isn’t salat without the Fatiha. This doesn’t mean reciting the Fatiha out loud as those who have been frightened away from using their intellect and reason in case they become “confused” think it does…. It means salat can’t be really established and experienced without contemplating on, feeling and experiencing the meaning of the Fatiha… It’s really very sad, the herders and the herded alike are missing out on the most profound experience the Quran invites us to have and passing on to the realm of eternal life with this irrecoverable deprivation and loss…
They’ve been conditioned to think READing the Quran is all about the correct pronunciation of its Arabic letters and performing salat is a way of deifying and consecrating “god”…
On the contrary, salat is about introspectively turning to the reality of the Names comprising one’s essence, i.e. it is to worship Allah, where worship means being conscious of and fulfilling one’s servitude. This in other words means knowing, feeling, experiencing the reality that one’s being is comprised of Allah’s Names and that essentially the ‘person’ doesn’t exist (the state of nothingness). It’s important to understand this well as hidden duality stems from here.
The chapters Ikhlas and Fatiha in the Quran contain the quintessential knowledge to enable the believer to understand and experience this truth. He who discerns and lives by this reality will discover the essence of his being and the nothingness of his “self” within the Absolute SELF and thus experience the ascension denoted by salat!
These are the doors to the infinite beautiful bounties to which the Rasul of Allah (saw) opened for us. Those who enter may encounter beauties no eye has ever seen and no speech has ever expressed before!