Asceticism in Islam

Additionally, Muslim spiritual teachers believe that the Creator discloses Itself to every human being as an act of Divine grace, an awareness we serendipitously receive at least once in our lifetime, given as a reminder to all humans of a compact we each made before our souls were incarnated into this life. The Qur'an asserts that all human souls were arraigned in a prior existence to this life, and shall exist to be arraigned again after it. How come we do not remember this Covenant with the Lord, a Day when, according to the Qur'an, God asked us "Am I not your Lord?" (alastu birabbikum?; Qur'an 7:172) The reason is that there are boundaries (barzakh) between the different realms, veiled in such a way that they cover the consciousness of mortals when they move from one realm to another. It is as though we drink from a stream of oblivion, and our task in this life is to learn to lift the veils and to remember in this realm what we have seen and done in the previous realm of our existence. The Creator gives each human being the opportunity to remember the act of bearing witness to God, and the human individual in turn either accepts or rejects it. Those who reject it are "rejecters of God" (kafir or "infidel"); those who accept it are "believers."

The ultimate human attainment of all religious activity in the Islamic viewpoint therefore can be described as:

1. Witnessing the reality of God, called the shahadah, followed by merging our individual human consciousness--bounded in the self or ego--with God. This step of dissolving or extinguishing the boundaries of the ego or self and merging and anchoring it with the Divine Self is called fana'.

2. Anchoring our consciousness in God and maintaining a state of union with God. This phase is called baqa', which means "abiding"

3. Returning to the plane of human work in a state wherein our will is submitted to the Divine will, called islam, maintaining a state of God-mindfulness and obedience to the Divine will, called taqwa (often translated as "piety") and to discharge a God-given mandate on earth during one's lifetime.

Looking at this objective through an Islamic lens but using vocabulary associated with the Hindu Brahman, or supreme Reality, it is the personal attainment of anchoring oneself in Absolute Being or Reality (sat), Absolute Consciousness (chit) and Absolute Bliss (ananda). God, according to the Islamic viewpoint, has ninety-nine Attributes or Divine Names (compiled from many more found in the Qur'an and the prophetic Traditions), two of which are pure nouns (al-haq: Reality or Truth, and al-salam, Peace or Bliss) the rest being adjectival nouns that describe God, including al-'alim (the All-knowing) and al-khabir (the All-aware), which together describe well the objectives of Hindu personal attainment.

Buddhism, again looked at through an Islamic lens, prefers not to speak about the Divine or its "nature" (the Prophet Muhammad urged his followers not to dwell on the nature of God as it could lead to wrong ideas that would thereby constitute sin against God), and instead focuses on the personal process of attaining the "moments of contact" with the Absolute and anchoring oneself with It, that is, achieving enlightenment.