Beginning with Basmala, this book is written in the name of
Allah! The best refuge is in the name of Allah! His blessings are beyond all
calculations; Most Compassionate, Most Forgiving is Allah!
Allâhu ta’âlâ created Paradise and Hell beforehand.
Preordaining, in the eternal past, that He would fill both of them with men and
genies, He declared this fact in His Books. As there have been believing and good
people deserving Paradise since (the first man and Prophet) Âdam ‘alaihis-salâm’, there have
also been faithless, unwise and wicked people who have been committing the
evils which will carry them to Hell. These two groups of people will go on
occupying the earth till Doomsday. The number of angels is incomparably greater
than that of men, and they are all faithful and obedient. Men, by contrast, are
more rarely faithful than they are faithless, disobedient and transgressive.
Good people and wicked ones have always tried to
annihilate each other, the wicked have also attacked one another and lived in
distress and anxiety throughout history. Believers have performed jihâd in
order to discipline unbelievers and to guide them to true faith and thereby to
endless bliss, and to steer mankind to a happy and peaceful life in this world
and the next. Unbelievers, on the other hand, have established dictatorial
regimes, wherein a minor group abuses the weak and the inferior in order to
lead a life of debauchery and dissipation and to satisfy their voluptuous
desires. And, in order to conceal their evils, harms and disservices, they have
attacked Prophets ‘alaihim-us-salâm’ and the religions they brought because
they established the principles of ethics, virtue and integrity. In some
centuries these attacks were pressed with deadly weaponry, and sometimes they
were made in clandestine warfare, which included false propaganda,
mischief-making, raising social commotions, subversion, undermining religions
from within, and destroying Islamic states from the within.
Likewise, the luminous Islamic religion, which is a guide to salvation
and improvement and a -beacon to material and spiritual progress, and which was
revealed to our master, the final and the -highest Prophet
Muhammad Mustafâ ‘sall-Allâhu alaihi wa
sallam’, whom Allâhu ta’âlâ created as the most
superior, the most beautiful and the most honourable one of the entire mankind
worldover in all respects, and chose and sent him as the Prophet to all nations,
was
subjected to the same treatment. Faithless, immoral and lecherous people not
only attacked His religion in crusading expeditions, which included all sorts
of torment and barbarity, but also strove hard to dupe Muslims by disguising
themselves as Muslims, making mendacious and misleading oral and written
statements, setting brothers against one another and thereby demolishing Islam
from within. The damage caused by their seditionary endeavours howls of their
success.
Subversive activities among Muslims date back to the time
of the Ashâb-i-kirâm ‘alaihim-ur-ridwân’, when a Yemeni Jew, who had professed
to embrace Islam and changed his name to Abdullah bin Saba’, sowed the first seeds of discord among Muslims. He started a
diabolical trend. He attempted to vilify the Sahâba, who were the companions of
the Messenger of Allah ‘sall-Allâhu ’alaihi wa sallam’. The heresy invented by
the Jew was called the Rafidî sect, an appellation which has ultimately changed into the Shiite
sect. His example was followed by many an enemy of religion, who invented many
a heresy under the cloak of religious men and misled millions of Muslims out of
the true course.
The Messenger of Allah ‘sall-Allâhu ’alaihi wa sallam’ had
foretold about this deplorable catastrophe that was going to befall his Umma
(Muslims), with the following statements: “My Umma
will part into seventy-three different groups. Seventy-two of them will swerve
from the right path and end up in Hell. One group will abide by my and my
Sahâba’s path.” This group of the right path has
been called Ahl as-sunna(t).
The earliest of these heretical sects, the Râfidî
sect, which is the worst, too, reappears from time to time and spreads among
ignorant communities, and the faithless fan it to exploit it as a weapon. That
this sect is a non-scientific assortment of distorted facts and events
reinforced with some misinterpreted Koranic verses and Prophetic utterances
manifests itself in the so-called book Husniyya,
one of their recent publications, in the booklets which they sometimes hand out
to uneducated people at the entrances of mosques, and in the statements they
make. Naming a few valuable books is one of the stratagems that they use to
make their absurdities believable, although they cannot cite a single line from
those authentic books. When uneducated people hear the names of those books,
they believe these people. Their absurd and unsound slanders, and the true
tenets of belief explained in the light of Qur’ân
al-kerîm and hadîth-i-sherîfs by the
scholars of (the right path called) Ahl as-Sunnat, are collated under the
adjudication of authentic documents in the book Ashâb-i-kirâm
(Sahâba ‘The
blessed’),
by Sayyid Abdulhakîm Effendi ‘rahmatullâhi ’aleyh’. During the printing of this
book, a list of the biographies of the two hundred and sixty-five celebrities
mentioned in the book was appended in alphabetical order for the purpose of
informing our dear readers about them. The Turkish original, Ashâb-i-kirâm, of our book ‘Sahâba the Blessed’ was printed in 1982 for the
first time. Allâhu ta’âlâ has now blessed us
with the lot of realizing its twenty-second edition, (and also this first
edition in English).[1]
May Allâhu ta’âlâ bless Muslims with reading this book with unbiased attention and
thereby learning the true path!
Muslims on the earth today have parted into three groups. The first group are Muslims who follow the path led by the Ashâb-i-kirâm. They are called the Ahl as-Sunnat, or the Sunnî Muslims (Sunnites), or the Firqa-i-nâjiyya (the group to be saved from Hell). In the second group are the enemies of the Ashâb-i-kirâm. They are called Râfidîs, or Shiîs (Shiites), or Firqa-i-dâlla(heretical group). The third group are inimical towards the Shiites as well as towards the Sunnites. They are called Wahhâbîs, or Nejdîs, which comes from the Arabian province Nejd, the birthplace of their heresy. The third group are also called the Firqa-i-mel’ûna (the accursed group). Indeed, it is written in our (Turkish) books Kıyâmet ve Âhıret and Se’âdet-i Ebediyye, (and also in our publications in English, such as Advice for the Muslim, and in the fourth chapter of The Sunnî Path,) that they call Muslims ‘disbelievers’. Our Prophet has accursed a person who calls a Muslim ‘disbeliever’. The breaking of Muslims into these three groups was contrived by Jews and British plotters.
Any person who indulges in the sensuous desires of his
nafs and has an evil heart will go to Hell, regardless of the group he belongs
to. Every Muslim should continually say the words, “Lâ ilâha illâ-Allah,” in order to
purify himself of the unbelief and sinfulness which are inherent in his nature,
-this act of purification is termed ‘Tazkiya-i-nafs’-, and also the words, “Astaghfirullah,” in order to purify his
heart from the disbelief and sinfulness which he contracted from his nafs, from
the devil, from evil company or from harmful and subversive books. If a person
obeys the (commandments and prohibitions of the) Sharî’at, his prayers will
certainly be accepted. Not performing (the daily prayers called) namâz, looking
at women who have not covered their bodies properly or at other people who
expose those parts of their body that must be covered, and consuming goods that
have been
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[1] This English version does not contain the biographies.
earned through (an illegal way called) harâm, are symptoms of a
person’s disobeying the Sharî’at. Such a person’s prayers will not be accepted.