Wardah's Bookshelf

By striking camp he [the desert nomad] sloughed off his yesterdays; and tomorrow seemed less of a fatality if its where as well as its when had yet to come. But the townsman was a prisoner; and to be fixed in one place – yesterday, today, tomorrow – was to be a target of time, the ruiner of all things. Towns were places of corruption. Sloth and slovenliness lurked in the shadow of their walls…

Muhammad s.a.w: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources
| Abu Bakr Sirajuddin Martin Lings

Fasting is a universe in itself, a realm in which we learn about discipline in the most direct way with regard to the tongue, stomach, genitals and eyes. Islam places great emphasis on discipline because there is so much at stake. Without discipline, religion would be impossible.

Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart, the Matharat al-Qulub of Imam al-Mawlud
| Translation and commentary by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

Choose your words, and you must know your contemporaries well… Speak to people about what they know and spare them what they cannot grasp. It rarely happens, in fact, for a man not to be hostile to what he does not know… act in such a way that you may be a mercy for others, even if He has made you a trial for yourself. Present yourself not in accordance with your inner state but theirs; speak to them from the heart but according to what suits them and this will work out better for them and for you.

Shaykh al-Junayd

| Spiritual Teachings of the Prophet (s): Hadith and Commentaries by Saints and Sages of Islam

[Imam] Ja’far al-Sadiq was asked: ‘Why are our supplications not answered?’ He replied: ‘Because you do not know the One you are supplicating’.

| Spiritual Teachings of the Prophet (s): Hadith and Commentaries by Saints and Sages of Islam

Nothing is ours but illusion, and therefore we hold onto it firmly.

Death and the Dervish

| Mesa Selimovic

The sacred arts embraced within the mekteb (place of the book) are five - silence for listening, listening for speaking, speaking for writing, writing for recitation, and recitation for listening.

Maintaining a Sacred Center: The Bosnian City of Stolac

| Rusmir Mahmutcehajic

Wardah Books: Welcome Message

One’s heart is an ocean, and one’s tongue is the shore; one finds traces of what is in the ocean, on the shore.

The Soul and A Loaf of Bread: The Teachings of Sheikh Abol Hasan of Kharaqan

| Vraje Abramian

Our sports cars, holidays and pension plans, all the status symbols of the modern manner of living, seem tasteless and without meaning. The reason is understood intuitively by many, but few know how to respond. We have lost contact with the mystery that lies within ourselves; we have forgotten what we are… Science cannot tell us how to live. ‘The blank space in the modern heart,’ said scientist Julian Huxley, ‘is a God-shaped blank. And life without the transcendent is not only desultory and without meaning, it is miserable, as the Quran tells us. We can only become robots, anaesthetized by television, drink, and our leisure preoccupations if we fail to hear the insistent inquiry of the Quran: ‘Where, then, are you going’.

Islam: Religion of Life
| Abdul Wadod Shalabi, edited by Abdal Hakim Murad

Most people are easy prey for propaganda because of their firm but entirely erroneous conviction that it is composed only of lies and “tall stories” and that, conversely, what is true cannot be propaganda. But modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. It operates instead with many different kinds of truth - half-truth, limited truth, truth out of context.

Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

| Jacques Ellul

Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart, the Matharat al-Qulub of Imam al-Mawlud | Translation and commentary by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart, the Matharat al-Qulub of Imam al-Mawlud
| Translation and commentary by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf