By Amatul Qafaar
“And we made your sleep (a means for) rest…” (Quran, Surah 78, Ayah 9)
Have some of us didn’t forsake to give their bodies the rest it was entitled to get? Didn’t we forget to strike a balance between sleeping and being awake? Did we plan to lose the precious hours before the dawn, when we regularly sleep just before the dawn?
Shaitan tries to find ways to deceive human beings and one of the ways he deceived them is to convince them to break the divine pattern of sleep. You might ask me, how is that? But, do you not think that by following the opposite pattern of sleep prescribed by prophet Mohamed (May peace and blessings be upon him) is indeed a trap of the devil and it needs to be corrected?
Sleep is a sign of human weakness, the fact that Allah has designed times for it is a test to see who goes with it and who goes against the designed times. Prophet Mohamed (saw), as reported by Aisha bint Abi Bakr, was living Quran and his actions were in perfect harmony with the Quran and thus his sleeping habits would be the right thing to look at when you are looking for the divinely desired sleeping habits that will make us gain Allah’s pleasure.
Prophet Mohamed (saw) told his companions to go to sleep right after Isha, he told them not to chat or do anything else but to sleep so that they can get enough sleep before they wake up for the night prayers, and this means that by staying up all night, sometimes doing things far worse than only chatting will automatically mean that your intention for waking up for Fajr is in danger, let alone waking up before Fajr and taking advantage of the last hour of the night.
By not sleeping the right time, you will end up sleeping the wrong times, prophet Mohamed (saw) said that Allah blessed the early hours of the day for this Ummah, but by not getting sufficient sleep during the night, you will do the exact opposite as the hadeeth and you will not wake up for Fajr or you will pray Fajr lazily and will go back to sleep after Fajr and thus you will lose the blessings and might even earn a sin for yourself by not paying attention to what the Prophet said.
Breaking the prophetic pattern of sleep is connected with one another and you will break everything he said about sleep right after you break the first one, that means that when you wake up late in the morning then you won’t be able to take the mid nap that the Prophet (saw) encouraged, it is narrated that he said “Take a nap in the middle of the day, for only the devils don’t take naps”, what is worse than doing what only the devils are meant to be doing?
That brings us to the end of our third article of our series Ramadan Gist, I would like to end it by saying let us all look at our sleeping patterns and try to make them more prophetic, In sha Allah, that will better our living conditions in a ways that we have never imagined before.
