my faith
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ISLAM
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clothes and with
wudu’
in which all the visible organs
that have a special place in the physical structure of
man, and can be said to symbolise the whole of the
body, are washed. Moreover, hands, feet, face and
head are the parts that, generally, remain uncovered,
and, hence, these alone are required to be washed or
wiped lightly in
wudu’.
The pious, whose spirituality has not been blunted by
surrendering it hopelessly to beastly urges, experience
a feeling of filthiness and a sort of gloom and dullness
within themselves in the state of impurity, ie. when their
Wudu
’ has been voided due to a natural evacua tion or
some other reason. After having performed the
wudu’
this gives place to a sense of spiritual cleanliness and
effulgence. Herein lies the chief purpose and signifi-
cance of
wudu’
and it is because of this that it has been
made a pre-requisite of offering
Salah
, or, in other
words, of making one’s special presence in the Court of
the Almighty. But this much even we, the common peo-
ple, can realise, that
wudu’
is a solemn act of prepara-
tion for presenting one self in the Court of the Supreme
Being. People who perform
wudu’
even with this mini-
mal awareness do feel a rare joy and effulgence in it.
In many
Ahadith
the cleansing or washing away of sins
with the water used for
wudu’
has been mentioned.
Although sins do not possess a visible or external
impurity that can physically be removed by the use of
water but the cleansing of sins in these traditions signi-
fies pardon and forgiveness. When a person commits a
sin its unholy effects settle, at first, on the limbs with
which he perpetrates it, and then in his heart.
Afterwards, as in obedience to the command of Allah
and in order to purify himself, he per forms
wudu’
the
foulness of the misdeeds he has been guilty of and the
impurity that has come to defile and contaminate his
limbs as a result of it is washed away and the trans-
gressions are forgiven by Allah.
A Muslim, when attending to ritual purity in the things
that envelop him in progressively closer layers - his
