by Umme Adil Nawaz

Created on: November 22, 2010

Surah Al-Ikhlas

Although we have a firm belief that our Lord is one and only Allah… only He has the right to be worshipped… yet we do not always follow His commands and thus we become distanced from the purity of faith. The devil uses our weakness to further put barriers between us and the real truth… and so we become attracted to other things besides Allah and this involvement leads to shirk i.e. associating partners with Allah.

Even if we think that our faith is pure yet we can all see that in our lives we give more importance to other things than Allah and so our way of life is not purely Islamic… but this is such a harmful thing; even though apparently it seems quite alright to adapt to the changing world… some people even call it enlightenment or progress… but if you read the Quran and Hadith, it becomes very clear that to Allah the only acceptable religion is the religion of Purity… the religion of Tauheed. So at the end of our journey Allah is once again reminding us of our real destination:

“Say: He is Allah the One and Only.” (112: 1)

Like a majority of Muslims, I learned this surah in the earliest years of my childhood but sadly it was thought enough to just memorize the words of Quran and read them without understanding or thought. So we spend our whole lives reciting this beautiful surah without actually knowing that we are declaring our faith… Allah wanted us to know Him and to be eternally devoted to Him with all our heart and soul but how could our hearts feel any warmth of love without any knowledge? What a waste of life to keep running after other “gods” who could neither give us anything nor satisfy our yearning hearts… the hearts which can only be satisfied with the perfect adoration of a perfect Allah:

“Allah is the Self-Sufficient (independent of all, while all are dependent on Him)” (112:2)

In one word “As-Samad” Allah has given us His complete introduction… because it encompasses all the qualities of power, strength and eternal perfection. We keep searching for our “ideal” not realizing that our ideal can be none other than Allah… because no one has the level of completeness and perfection which Allah has. All through the history of the world, people kept trying to prove the false notion that Allah has a son or daughters… but the fact is that He is so complete that he does not require any parent or any offspring:

“He begets not, nor is He begotten.” (112:3)

The beauty of the Quran is most apparent in this surah because in such few words it presents to us the complete truth without any falsehood, without any imperfection at all. My heart seems to glow with the light of the following words which prove beyond doubt that Allah is most unique and incomparable… nobody is like Him and He is like no one:

“And there is none comparable to Him.” (112: 4)

What a freedom it is to feel the comfort of being Allah’s worshipper. What more honor than to be under the direct care and supervision of the most magnificent Lord? It makes me feel so grateful to Allah that He blessed me with this pure Book which taught me to nurture this pure faith… but at the same time this surah also fills me with a sense of awesome responsibility that I have to be very, very careful in all my actions because the pure faith demands pure worship and complete obedience with proper humility and respect for the most perfect Allah.

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