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formula that He Himself has Revealed in Arabic in the Qur’an, and
thereby beautified and made holy in its very form. God says:
Is he whose breast God has opened to Islam, so that he follows
a light from his Lord [like he who disbelieves]? So woe to
those whose hearts have been hardened against the remembrance
of God. Such are in manifest error. / God has revealed the
most beautiful of discourses, a Book, consistent with itself (yet)
repeating — whereat quiver the skins of those who fear their
Lord; then their skins and their hearts soften to the remembrance
of God. That is God’s guidance, by which He guides whomever
He wishes; and whomever God leads astray, for him there is
no guide. (Al-Zumar, 39:22–23)
Thus the invocation of God’s Name in Arabic— (Allah)—is
a sacrament in itself. This explains why only constant invocation of
a sacred formula from the Qur’an containing God’s Name is able to
penetrate ‘the skin’ of human beings into the hearts, and eventually
their inner hearts (af ’ida) and cores (albab).
(d) Summary of the purposes and functions
of the rites of ISLAM, IMAN and IHSAN
Summarizing the purposes and functions of the rites of Islam, Iman
and Ihsan, we may say the following:
Islam:
1. The Two Testimonies of Faith (Shahadatayn) are an act of both the
will and the intelligence, and involve the (subtle) ‘breast’ (sadr).
2. The Five Canonical Daily Prayers (Salat) serve to ‘attach’ the soul
(and many of its faculties including the faculty of speech, the imagination,
the memory, and the faculty of learning and of imitation—these
being particularly engaged by the Qur’an) ‘to’ God. The body, too, is
Revelation and therefore does not act as a vehicle of Divine grace and objective holiness.
Moreover, Ihsan requires Iman a priori, which is to say that even the invocation of a Divine
Name without the presence of faith in the first place would not be effective, just as faith
without Islam is not effective.
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