Remember Him and you shall be remembered

Bismillah.

Alhamdulillah wa shukrulillah. We are honored and thankful to be shown partials of the translation of Shaykh Ahmad Al-Alawi's teachings called 'The Freshest Pools in Question & Answers'.

In one of the sections of the original book in Arabic which contains 231 pages, As-Shaykh Ahmad Al-Alawi answered a question which in my opinion, was rarely asked. I think it's a query which only a deeply inquisitive mind who regularly contemplates God, would ponder.

Yes, we often heard the Qur'anic verse where Allah says: "Remember Me and I shall remember you."  It is from Verse 152 of the Surah Al Baqarah. The full ayah as translated by Mufti Muhammad Taqi Uthmani is as follows: "So Remember Me, and I will remember you, and be thankful to Me, and be not ungrateful to Me."

With reference to this verse, a student of Shaykh Ahmad Al-Alawi asked his venerated master, "How does Allah remember His servants?"

The master answered: "As for our remembrance of our Lord it is so by saying أﷲ,أﷲ‬ Allah, Allah or with any of Allah’s beautiful names, and it is well understood like this with no complexity. As for Allah’s remembrance of the one doing the act of remembrance, it is here with the ambiguity lies with respect to ‘how’ and by which method, so how would this be? [He asked this question to the audience of his disciples-and when he knew they found some difficulty answering the question, he proceeded to answer it]:-

Allah Has drawn our attention in this verse to that which will make us remembered by people throughout history [future generations]; it is as though Allah is saying: If you would like to be respectfully remembered by future generations, so remember Me, and I will have you remembered by their future generation peoples’ tongues. It is this fact that makes the ‘Dhakeerina’ [folks of Allah] very well remembered by the general masses and the elect among Allah’s folks, and it is this the remembrance of Allah of the ones who remembered Him in past generations, as a meet requital, because reward stems from the act of performing good deeds and Allah knows best."

Therefore, we can deduce from the above that those names - the awliya', who have left us, some left us 78 years ago (i.e. Shaykh Al-Alawi), some over 300 years ago (i.e. Imam Al-Haddad), and others over 800 years ago (i.e. Shaykh Abdul Qadir Al-Jilani), we can imagine how much these people of Allah had been remembering Allah, that they are so very alive on our tongues and in our hearts to this day. MashaAllah!

With the barakah of the awliya' who are ahlillah, past and present, all of them, known and hidden, we pray with their barakah, we are able to remember Allah with much remembrance, InshaAllah.

We also pray as practiced by Prophet Ibrahim a.s.:

Rabbi habli hukman wa alhiqni bis solehin

waj 'alli lisaana sidqin fil akhirin

waj 'alni min warasati jannatin naeem

"O Lord, bestow hikmah on me and join me with the righteous and grant me a reputation of honor amongst later generations, and make me an inheritor of the paradise Jannatun Naeem."

Ameen.

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Credit: Sidi Muhammad Issa & Sidi Abdelkarim Belaid