Chapter on Knowing Wara' (Scrupulous Abstinence)

Chapter on the Knowledge of Wara' (Scrupulous Piety)

I said: What is wara'?

He said: Avoiding what God, Exalted and Glorious, has detested. Among its meanings is the saying of 'Umar, may God be pleased with him: "They exercised wara' regarding the origin" — "Drive it away and keep it far from your mounts, and do not watch over it" — meaning: do not tend to it. Among its meanings is the saying of the Arabs: "He weaned the camels" — meaning he selected them.

So taqwa (God-consciousness) is the first station of the worshippers, and through it one knows the condition of the supreme ones, and through it the loftiest are purified in their deeds. For God, Exalted and Glorious, does not accept any deed except that by which His countenance is intended. By God, He was not pleased with many of those who practiced taqwa for Him, the Most High, alone, until they gave Him the utmost effort of their hearts and bodies, and expended for Him their lifeblood and their wealth. So look, may God have mercy on you, where you stand among them.

Indeed, I have feared that the generality of the people of our time among the worshippers (are deceived, deluded). How many among them are those who wear coarse garments, who humble themselves in their own estimation, taking a meager portion of the rubble of this world; and among them are those who pray, who fast, who go on military expeditions, who perform pilgrimage, who weep and bid farewell, who make a show of zuhd (renunciation) in this world and of rejecting it — yet not upon sincerity of conscience toward the Lord of the Worlds, Exalted and Glorious. Rather, he feigns for the servants of God through what he outwardly displays of acts of obedience, while imagining himself to be among the sincere ones, yet all the while (his limbs are unrestrained) — an eye that looks at what God has detested, and a tongue with which he adorns himself not out of love for God, Exalted and Glorious, in His anger and in his intimacy with people and his conversation with them (through backbiting and the like).