Thiès, Jul 10 (APS) – The imam of the Moussanté mosque, Tafsir Babacar Ndiour, focused his Tabaski prayer sermon on Sunday on love in all its dimensions and its impact on a flourishing and salvation in the herefollowing.
Imam Ndiour insisted on three types of love: the love of the individual for his Lord, for his neighbour, and the love of God for his servant.
He points out that ”the greatest love is the love of Allah”, which is manifested by deeds, by obedience to his commandments. It implies knowing God, because there is no love without knowledge.
”He who created and who gives sustenance, doesn’t he deserve to be loved?” he wondered, before answering in the affirmative.
“Say: ‘If you love Allah, follow me, Allah will love you,'” he said, quoting a verse from the Quran. By loving Allah and following his commandments through the teachings of the Prophet, man makes himself immortal by his works, he noted, noting that loving his Lord and fearing him results in righteousness.
He cited, in this regard, the example of the Prophet (PSL), his companions and all those who followed his path, including the Muslim religious leaders whom Senegal has known.
“The big question is to know: we who are here, shouldn’t we do like them?”, continued Imam Tafsir Babacar Ndiour, stressing that Allah is capable, today as yesterday, of elevate to the highest degree those who follow his commandments.
The greatest objective of the Muslim being to obtain the approval of Allah and to enter Paradise, he is conditioned to love his neighbour, as reported in this hadith of the Prophet (PSL) according to which ”You do not ‘will enter Paradise only if you believe and you will only believe if you love yourself’.
For Imam Ndiour, of all the definitions of love, whether they come from philosophers, writers or others, the most sublime is that of the prophet (PSL): ” None of you will believe unless he loves for his brother what he loves for himself. An attitude that breaks with the Wolof adage that ”preferring my person to you does not mean that I hate you”. “Where’s the love in that?” he wondered.
Calling to banish pride, the unbridled search for prestige, personal interest, the religious believes that love in the Islamic sense of the term leads us to be at the service of others and to favor the general interest to the detriment of the ‘personal interest.
The love of work is a value to cultivate, he continued, stressing the need for young people to get down to work, especially to cultivate the land and get rid of the “wage myth”. With 60% of the world’s arable land, and the youngest population, he says it’s a “shame” for Africa to depend on other continents for food.
On the other hand, Imam Ndiour emphasizes that anything that does not attract the approval of God and that moves away from the adoration of the Lord, does not deserve to be loved.
