Reaching Piety by Perfecting Your Prayer

All praise and thanks are due to Allah, the One Who guided us to Islaam without being obligated to do so, and blessed us with strong, upright teachers who can help guide us correctly. And may the salaah and salaam of Allah be upon His most accepted creation, Muhammad, our leader and role model, and his kind and honorable Aal and great Companions. Aameen. Thereafter;

Having the correct belief in Allah and His Messenger is the most rewardable act. After that, once someone is a believer, the next most rewardable act for this Muslim is his prayer. The prayer is a great act of worship and can lead one to piety if done properly and with care, in shaa’ Allah. It also has many secrets and blessings related to it.

Brian Tracy, a motivational speaker, says, “The ability to concentrate single mindedly on your most important task, to do it well, and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life.”

One of the shaykhs said, “Whoever prays complete prayers, satisfying everything (all conditions, integrals, sunnahs, etc), will definitely reach taqwaa (piety). Many Muslims who pray do not reach taqwaa because they are either doing something wrong in their prayer or they are leaving something out. Maybe they are not having enough khushoo^ (God-fearingness) throughout their prayer. But surely, the one who prays a complete prayer (i.e. every time) will reach taqwaa (in shaa’ Allah).”

This is because the prayer helps one leave out all other sins, so if one is very fearful and careful in his prayer, this will tremendously help straighten him outside of the prayer, and he will be reminded to always fear Allah. Just think about it. The one who just finished praying a prayer in which he was sincere, humble, and cautious of all his doings and sayings, and feared Allah throughout the entire time is much, much less likely to go and commit a sin right afterwards. Now imagine praying like this five times a day every day.

Many times, the kuffaar say statements that are true in themselves, but unfortunately, they do not have the proper belief in Allah and His Messenger, and so they don’t always apply these statements correctly. Furthermore, they get absolutely no reward in the Hereafter whether they apply them correctly or not. For the blasphemers, many of their goals stop here, in this life. Success, achievement, respect, having a high status, and being happy, to them, almost every time, means -IN THIS LIFE- only. For us, it is different. We know that the real success is the success in the Hereafter. So while the two aforementioned quotes have a lot in common, as is obvious, the end goals are completely different. Brian Tracy is calling for success “…in [this] life” and the shaykh is calling on us to gain piety, by which we would be successful in this life and the next, in shaa’ Allah.

Perfecting our prayers is a great way to reach piety. If you think about it, we pray every day anyways, so why not spend more time perfecting our prayers and displaying more khushoo^ lillaahi ta^aalaa if this will help us reach our goal of being pious?

Note: One of the conditions of the prayer is wuDoo’, so this means one must also perform a complete wuDoo’, including all the sunnahs, and while not falling into anything makrooh.

I ask Allah to make it easy on you and myself to pray complete prayers, satisfying all the conditions, integrals, and sunnahs, and having khushoo^ from the moment we say Allahu Akbar until we say As-salaamu ^alaykum. Aameen.