The Supplications of Yunus and Ayyūb (as)

The Supplication of Ayyūb (as)

THE SECOND FLASH

بِسْمِ اللّٰهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحٖيمِ

اِذْ نَادٰى رَبَّهُ اَنِّى مَسَّنِىَ الضُّرُّ وَاَنْتَ اَرْحَمُ الرَّاحِمِينَ

This supplication of Ayyūb (as), the model of patience, is both tried and proven effective. However, in accordance with the instruction of this verse, we should utter our supplication as follows:

رَبِّى اِنِّى مَسَّنِىَ الضُّرُّ وَاَنْتَ اَرْحَمُ الرَّاحِمِينَ

The summary of the well-known story of Ayyūb (as) is as follows:

Ayyūb (as) was afflicted for a long period with illness and suffering. Despite his condition, he kept in mind the immense thawāb contained within it and endured his illness with perfect patience. When his illness began to affect his heart and tongue—the organs through which Allah is glorified and known—he feared that it would harm his duty of worship. Thereupon he supplicated to Allah, not for the sake of his own comfort, but solely for the sake of his worship, saying: “O Lord! Affliction has touched me! It is harming the dhikr I utter with my tongue and the worship I perform with my heart.”

Thereupon Allah accepted his sincere, pure, and inward supplication, made solely for His sake, in a miraculous manner. He restored his health and caused him to experience His mercy in all its forms.

This treatise contains five points.

The First Point

Unlike the bodily illnesses of Ayyūb (as), we suffer from spiritual illnesses that afflict our soul and heart. Were we to be turned inside out, we would appear far more wounded and diseased than Ayyūb (as). For every sin we commit and every doubt that enters our mind wounds our heart and soul. The wounds of Ayyūb (as) threatened only his brief worldly life. Our spiritual wounds, by contrast, threaten our eternal life. We therefore stand in need of that supplication of Ayyūb (as) a thousand times more than he himself did.

Indeed, just as the germs that arose from the wounds of Ayyūb (as) affected his heart and tongue, so too the spiritual illnesses that emerge as a result of committing sins, and the doubts concerning the truths of faith that arise from those spiritual illnesses, affect our heart—may Allah protect us from them. Since īmān resides in the heart, our īmān is thereby also harmed. Moreover, they affect the spiritual pleasure of the tongue, which serves as the means for expressing īmān; they cause us to withdraw from dhikr with aversion and reduce us to silence.

Indeed, sins affect the heart and darken it step by step until the light of faith in the heart is completely extinguished. Within every sin there is a path leading to unbelief. If one does not swiftly protect oneself from that sin through repentance, then it will bite the heart not like a germ, but like a small snake.