Without this connection (with Allah) you will not be able to understand deen, to walk on deen. Either you will do deen according to culture or according to need, not according to muhabbat (love). What word Allah uses for love of humans for Allah? "Ashad", intense love. If I ask you to give fifteen minute lecture about Allah, you will become worried, this is just to point out what we do not know about Allah. If we have not been able to recognise Allah, then how can we fulfill his commandments? The most important thing is to build your relationship with Allah. This is the tarteeb (order, sequence) Allah used in Quran.
That doesn't mean that you say, if I don't have this connection, I will leave Salah and all worship and build this relationship first. It means that we need to identify Allah first. If you take the 2015 understanding of Quran, it is "Quran is a book of halal (permissible) and haraam (impermissible)". The most boring book in the world is a manual to operate something, giving the way it works and the precautions etc. Why is Allah calling us in the Quran by different names, He is interacting with me and you, we don't take that interaction as something that is worth reading. If Nobel Peace prize is given to a person, we all scramble towards the person, in our country we have Khawateen Digest (ladies magazine), if you ask people they will say we read it because it's interesting. Why don't we read Quran? Allah has kept a character building aspect in everything.
[Weekly Spiritual Gathering, talk by Shaykh Arsalan Ahmed, 29.10.2015]
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