No god but God!
Only those mindful of Allah receive guidance. And only those who Worship God can remain mindful of him. Only by remembering Allah all day they may be mindful of him. This initial seeding humility is necessary for receiving any more guidance. Only the ones with basic adab can develop their adab any further. The basic of adab is to know that there are things which you are not knowing. Only with this attitude can adab and then belief and then nearness to Allah be achieved. The belief in what you see not is the first step towards adab for it shows sincerity inside you and the shahadah that only God knows all and that you are yourself lacking. This attitude can only lead to submission and the first pillar of submission is that there can be no other teachers but God, because there can be no god but God and that Muhammad (saw) is his messenger. Hence they believe in what is revealed to the Prophets and have sure faith in the hereafter.
The second pillar of submission is prayer, establish prayer! All creatures in the heavens and the earth perform salat as the expression of universal submission to God. Have you not seen that everyone in the heavens and the earth glorifies God, and the birds spreading their wings? Each one knows its salat (prayer) and its glorification. Only then will God and the angels perform a salat whereby they bless God’s servants. It is He who performs the salat over you, and His angels, that He may bring us forth (unveil) from the darkness into the light. Such a believer is selfless and he gives out more than he receives for he knows that he and what is his in essence belongs to God, they donate to the needy what God has provided for them.
Worship, then, remains key to belief for it is only through it that you may remain mindful of God. It is such people who are then guided by God and God only will be successful for it is only God that veils and it can only be Him that can unveil. As for those who persist in raising other Gods in the name of other “isms”, it is same whether they are warned or not, argued with or not, they will never believe. It is like God has sealed their hearts and also their hearing and their sight is veiled, they cannot hear or see now. This behavior can only lead to punishment, the state they are in and the state that this would lead to.
Among them are people who say that they believe, they lay claim to God and label their actions as if commanded by God, they say “we believe in Allah” and “aakhirah”, yet they are not believers at all. Their claims are claims made under deception. They are deceiving their own selves when they claim to be the ansar of Allah, it is plain deception or God has made their deeds appear fair to them. They cannot deceive believers who see through their facade, and in fact God makes the believers’ heart averse to all they say. If they can’t deceive the believers, they surely can’t deceive Allah, yet they only deceive their own selves because their sight is veiled, they see nothing at all.
The hardness of their hearts is such that it can only be called a sickness. A sickness which makes them stay constantly in anger, full of rage and hate and when a believer speaks to them, the rage only increases. In fact, if the believers don’t speak to them or engage with them, to increase their rage and hence the sickness in their hearts, God makes them yearn to encounter the believers so that they may keep the flame burning inside their selves, there is no harsher flame but that of jahannam wherein they suffer here and in the hereafter.
God only lets them increase in their sickness. It is only because of this that when they are told “don’t spread fitnah, don’t spread fasaad, don’t bring chaos to order, don’t bring down civilization, don’t destroy medina“, they reply “we are only reformers, peace makers, we are followers of Allah, Rasoolullah, Ali and Hussain”, while the truth is that they recognize none of them and know not that none of them stood for anything these people call to. Indeed they abhor Yazeed, yet they are Yazeedis, but they fail to perceive it, for their sight is veiled.
The believers know it about them because when they are told “believe as others believe”, they reply within their hearts with arrogance “will we believe like these fools?”. They think of the believers to be fools and ignorant of reality, indeed it is they themselves who are fools, but they do not know because their sight is veiled. When they meet the believers, in debates, in discussions, in messages and elsewhere, they say “we also believe in Allah”, but when the believers go away they join the ranks of disbelievers in clubhouse rooms, in twitter trends, in the books they read, in the dps they keep, in the usernames they choose, in the vocabulary they use, and when they are alone with these of their evil associates, some of which are humans, when they hear their evil talk, when their read their evil scripture, when they hear about their evil heroes they say, “we are with you, we believe in you, sadaka ya Lux, sadaka ya Simone, sadaka ya Marx, we are with you” and then they mock the believers who only chose God and his messenger as their teachers. When the believers give the call, calling them to submission, their hearts harden and they mock the believers for “the tales of the old”, but when their evil comrades call them they say “Labbaik”. Allah will throw mockery back at them, and will leave them to continue wandering blindly in their defiance. This is because they have now traded guidance for misguidance. Is such a trade of any profit? They will not understand God has made them in their communism averse to all profit! In this way God closes even the small streets reaching towards the right path, they will never be rightly guided now!
They will never see peace because in whatever they achieve they will find darkness. When God grants them temporary success and they achieve what they set to achieve, their hearts do not find peace, the goals change, the rage increases and the cycle repeats. They are like those who wish to light candles, lightening up everything around them, and when it lightens shining bright with their candles, it is the believers only who are able to see, they themselves see nothing for God takes away their light, leaving them in complete darkness. They see that the goal is not met yet, the rage follows. Through these acts of theirs the believer’s heart lightens up and he sees through the facade. They are stuck in the loop, a vicious cycle, a self reinforcing cycle, how can they come out of it! Hence they will never return to the path for the path has been hidden from them by the whirlpool of the loop they are now in. You can see them as if deaf, dumb and blind!
When the rain God sends down brings life to the barren earth the believers prostrate in front of their Lord, singing his praises, denying none of his grandeur. The ones who take other isms as their gods see only darkness. The sky grows dark for them, the thunder and lightening challenges them. They press their fingers into their ears for the thunder feels like a call to death for them, the mushriqeen, their ancestors, would likewise plug their ears when Quran would be recited in front of them. This is how God encompasses them from all the sides. It is as if the lightening were to snatch away their sight. When the lightening strikes, they walk in its light, the light that exists for the believers all day all night, but when the light goes and their true selves take over, darkness descends upon them, then they see nothing and nothing enters their hearts. If God would have willed he would have seized them right there, surely God is capable of everything. Their plugging of ears and the loss of sight when the darkness descends is a reflection of their hearts.
Oh Humanity! The Believers and the Non-Believers! The Muslims and the Non-Muslims! The Men and the Women! The Adults and the Children! The Rich and the Poor! The Teacher and the Student! The Communist and the Capitalist! The Modernist and the Traditionalist! The Shii and the Sunni! The Rural and the Urban! The Intellectual and the Vulgar! The Pervert and the Sober! The Mohsin and the Vulgar! The Civilized and the Barbarian! Take no ism as your Lord but worship your Lord alone! He created you and those before you and those who you follow as your gods in ideology. Worship! So that your hearts may open! For it is worship only that makes you mindful of the Lord of heavens and earth. It is constant indulgence in other gods that you have built for yourself, their obsession takes you over, you spend your days with the gods you create out of Philosophy, Communism, Capitalism, Modernism, Nationalism, Feminism and forget your true Lord. These Gods you take and the scriptures they have written, you trade for the one sent down by your Lord, how would you remain mindful of your Lord, the Lord also of those that you follow!
Worship your Lord! Worship him five times a day! Worship him through every act you do so that you may become mindful of him! And indeed in the Prophet of Allah you will find the best way of worshiping him, indeed in him you would find the best of character to emulate in your daily life so that you may be mindful of God! The God that made this earth as a place of refuge and rest for you wherein you may settle and multiply and form your settlements. Settlements are the ones governed by law, the good law is the one that would forbid the evil and enforce the truth, therefore do not trivialize Law and Order for it is the backbone of a settlement and that of a civilization. He made sky as if a canopy for you from which he sends you rain, in this way he sends you all the rehmah so that you may feel complete. In his rehmah are your provisions. So do not set up equals to Allah by trading him with others, by worshiping others! Worship none but Him!
PS: There would still be many who doubt the truth of what has been written above. A simple way to refute all that is said above is drawing a similar exposition from Marx, Lux, Simone, Adam Smith and all others, taking help from all of them together and none from Allah and Quran and yet making sure that you are calling to nothing but Allah. You would be unable to call people to God from anything these isms provide you or that their texts provide you, you will not be able to bring peace to the hearts of people through them, you will not be able to make people mindful of God through them. As you will not be able to do so and surely you will not be able to do so, then fear the fire than is burning inside your hearts and that might one day become your abode, which already is abode to many of those in whose name you stop people’s hearts to come close to Allah!
Disclaimer: This is not a translation of Surah Baqarah. This is not even the Tafsir of Surah Baqarah. I have followed its outline from verse 1-24 to make the point that I wish to make. Kindly purify yourself and read Surah Baqarah itself so that we may all receive guidance from God and what is said in the above exposition falls in place.