:::Become a Good Muslim:::

Normally people used to think to give protection to their self physically by eating good nutrition and and expensive food and to defend themselves from the evil or bad thing by learning the martial arts. It is good because we can protect ourselves from dangerous and to defend us from any thing that unexpected. But how to defend and to protect our soul from the evil or bad things? This is our responsibility to think and to take action of the ways to protect our soul in order for it to be saved and preserved every time.

Therefore, in my opinion, if people ask me how to protect my soul from evil, I certainly respond by performing prayer. It is because the prayer is the pillar of religion. Without prayer we will be easily influenced by bad elements and will not have strong stand in our belief.  If we do not have strong belief how come we can perform our daily ‘amal or ibadah. It is then relates to our muamalah because if our ibadah is poor it will lead to poor muamalah also. The analogy is just simply like a house that does not have a pillar, it certainly will fall down. A building cannot be built without a pillar and it is similarly with our belief. Therefore prayer is very important to guide ourselves and to protect our soul from the evil. But it must have certain conditions in order for us to get good implication from the prayer.

Secondly, in order for me to protect my soul is by thinking of allah. There are many ways to think about Allah such as through zikir and reciting the Quran simultaneously understand its meaning. By reciting the Quran without understand the meaning is useless. Thus it becomes our responsibility to learn the arabic in order for us to understand what has been saying in the Quran.

Thirdly, it is probably quite advance because as a muslim we cannot forget that we have to do dakwah. Therefore by doing dakwah we can also protect our soul from the evil. It is because naturally men are good and free from sins. Men are always have the tendency to the good things. By doing dakwah, we will feel shame to do bad things because we want people to see us as a good person. There is one quotation that is “aslih nafsak, wad’u ghairak”, that means we improve ourselves and ask people to do the same. Besides, in surah as-saf verse three also Allah has warned us to do what we have said and not the other way around. For example if we say slander is haram, then we have to avoid it and leave it as far as we can.

As a conclusion, by doing all things that I have mentioned above, insyaAllah we can protect ourselves as well as our soul from the evil. As a muslim, we cannot just take it for granted about our soul. If we really want to protect our physical body, we are required to protect our soul also. Feed our body with good nutrition and feed our soul with good ‘amal, only then we can be a true muslim. Wallahu’alam.


*Copy & paste from my article for Islamic Ethics's Class (2011)