Anyone who has sat through a lecture and remembered only the anecdote already knows the principle this book is built on.
In the course of learning we come across sermons, admonitions and advice — and we come across stories drawn from the lives of righteous people. It is the second kind that holds our interest and leaves a deep-rooted impression, the kind we still remember years later and benefit from. This book was compiled in that spirit.
The Argument Underneath
The publisher's note makes an observation worth sitting with. Everyone wants to live fully, and everyone has goals, ambitions and desires. What differs is the mental framework a person brings to them, formed by environment, family, knowledge, education and profession.
A person with no internal limits will pursue his goals by whatever means come to hand, fair or otherwise, because nothing in him objects. A person who understands what life actually is — where it comes from, where it goes, what it is for — approaches the same ambitions differently, and finds himself bound to only lawful means.
Islam supplies that understanding: clear conceptions of life and death, of what is loved and disliked, of the forbidden and the permitted, of the lawful and the unlawful. Our pious predecessors did their utmost to live by them, and this book shows what that looked like in practice.
What It Contains
Episodes from the lives of the righteous — scholars, worshippers and ordinary people — each showing a teaching of Islam being lived rather than described. Sincerity of faith. Worship performed unobserved. Patience under real difficulty. Honesty when dishonesty would have cost nothing. Generosity from people who had little.
The pieces are short, which makes the book one to read a little at a time and return to.
Who It Is For
Families reading together. Anyone whose reading has been theoretical and who wants to see the theory carried out. Khutbah and halaqah material. Readers who find exhortation wearing but respond to a person.
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