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involved in this (since the prayer involves specific bodily movement).
Another indivisible part of prayers are ablutions, which serve to ‘reattach’
the body and its limbs towards God and detach a person from
his (or her) ego and previous sins, thereby also necessarily involving
the conscience (‘al-nafs al-lawwamah’).
3. Giving Tithe (Zakat) serves to detach people from the world and is
an act of sentiment.
4. Fasting (Siyam) the Holy Month of Ramadan annually serves to
detach people from their bodies and their egos.
5. The Pilgrimage (Hajj) is the return to one’s own true heart, and in
doing this a person also finds his (or her) own ‘soul at peace’.
Iman:
Faith (Iman) is an act of the (subtle) heart (qalb), but it also—to a
certain extent—engages the intelligence, the memory and intuition.
Faith necessarily involves performing good deeds and abstaining
from bad ones.
Ihsan:
Ihsan is not only the highest virtue, but a state comprising all the
virtues. It involves the inner hearts (fu’ad, pl. af ’ida) and cores (lubb,
pl. albab) of human beings. It requires frequent, if not constant,
remembrance of God.
A clear pattern emerges from the above: the rites and duties of
Islam, Iman and Ihsan are not haphazard or random. They are not
unrelated to each other. They are specifically designed and revealed
by God to suit human beings as such in order to systematically
involve every single one of human beings’ constituent parts and
faculties—in an exactly complementary and holistic way—in first
acknowledging God, and then in attaching themselves completely
to Him, and by the same token detaching the soul from the world,
the body and the ego.
To be precise (and recapitulating our list of human constitu-
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