Belief and Islam

TWO LETTERS BY
SHEREF ED-DÎN MUNÎRÎ
‘rahimah-Allâhu ta’âlâ’
Sheref ed-dîn Ahmad ibn Yahyâ Munîrî (d. in 782 A.H./1380),
one of the great Islamic scholars educated in India, wrote in the
18th letter of his Persian book Maktûbât: [1]
“Most people go wrong by acting upon doubts and illusions.
Some of such ill-thinking people say: ‘Allâhu ta’âlâ does not need
our ’ibâdât (acts of worship). Our ’ibâdât do Him no good. It is
indifferent to His Greatness whether people worship Him or
disobey Him. People who perform ’ibâdât go to trouble and bother
themselves in vain.’ This reasoning is wrong; people who do not
know Islam say so because they think that ’ibâdât are commanded
because they are useful to Allâhu ta’âlâ. This is a very wrong
supposition and it makes one confuse impossible with possible.
Any ’ibâda done by anybody is useful to himself only. Allâhu
ta’âlâ declares clearly in the eighteenth âyat of the Sûrat Fâtir that
this is so. A person who bears this wrong thought is like an invalid
whom the doctor recommends to diet but who does not diet and
says, ‘It won’t harm the doctor if I don’t diet.’ He is right to say that
it will not harm the doctor. But it will harm him. The doctor
recommends him to diet not because it will be useful to the doctor
himself but to cure the patient’s disease. If he follows the doctor’s
advice he will recover. If he does not, he will die, and this will not
harm the doctor at all.
[1] There are 100 letters in this collection of letters, (Maktûbât). It was
compiled in 741 [1339 A.D.] and printed in India in 1329 [1911].
There is a manuscript copy in the Süleymâniyye Library in Istanbul.
Irshâd as-sâlikîn and Ma’din al-ma’ânî are his two other valuable
works. Ghulâm ’Alî ’Abdullah ad-Dahlawî ‘rahimah-Allâhu ta’âlâ’, a
great scholar of Ahl as-Sunna who died in 1240 A.H. [1824],
recommended Ahmad ibn Yahyâ Munîrî’s Maktûbât in his ninetyninth
(99) letter and wrote that it was very helpful in purifying the
nafs. Sheref ad-dîn Ahmad ibn Yahyâ Munîrî ‘rahimah-Allâhu ta’âlâ’
lived in Bihar, India, where his grave is. Munîr is a village in Bihar.
His detailed biography is written in Shâh ’Abd al-Haqq ad-Dahlawî’s
‘rahimah-Allâhu ta’âlâ’ Persian work Akhbâr al-akhyâr, which was
published in Deoband, India, in 1332 [1914 A.D.] and was later
reproduced in Lahore, Pakistan.
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