Prophets bring God’s signs, just as the heavens, the earth and everything in them display God’s signs. The message of the prophets is that human beings were created to be God’s servants and vice-regents.
The role of the messengers of God and his friends is to lead people on a righteous path and call them to dhikr, remembrance of Him. If forgetfulness and heedlessness are the basic faults of human beings, dhikr is their saving virtue. The three senses of dhikr — mentioning, remembering and reminding — are inseparably bound together.
The Quran also uses other words that suggest what remembrance involves, such as hearing, seeing, reflecting and using one’s intellect.
To mention something is to recall it to the mind and remember it. Those who respond to God’s message mention him in prayers, glorify him, remember him in their hearts and put into practice the instructions of prophets. Forgetting God leads to the pain of being forgotten by him, just as remembering God results in the joy of him remembering us. In the Quran, Allah says, “Remember Me and I will remember you” (2:152).
To forget God is to yeild to the deceptions of Satan, since that is what he tries to achieve. God turns those who are forgetful of Him over to Satan and his associates. “Whosoever blinds himself to the remembrance of the merciful, to him we assign a Aatan who is then his comrade” (43: 36). The Quran makes clear that Satan is an enemy of human beings in dozens of verses. On the day of Resurrection, Allah tells us that He will command the sinners to stay in the distance from Him they have chosen. Although Satan disobeyed God, he is still doing God’s work by making human beings choose between good and evil.
When people believe that this world is all that matters and they are not accountable for their actions, they incur a spiritual death of their hearts. That human beings are themselves to blame for their suffering in the next world is a constant theme in the Quran. It says that Satan will address his followers with the words, “God surely promised you a true promise, and I promised you. Then I failed you for I had no authority over you, I simply called and you responded to me. So do not blame me, but blame yourselves” (14:22).
In the Islamic understanding of human nature, every child is born with fitrah, an innate recognition of God, but this knowledge of the divine becomes obscured by upbringing and circumstances. Dhikr is the remedy that enables the human soul to remember and recognise God again. It is the polish of the heart that removes the accumulated rust so that the heart becomes luminous once again, reflecting God’s attributes.
Sadia Dehlvi is a Delhi-based writer and author of Sufism: The Heart of Islam. She can be
contacted at sadiafeedback@gmail.com
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