An Introduction

The manual we are about to open was never meant to teach you a single prayer. Every believer owns a copy of Sahifa al-Sajjadiyyah or Mafatih al-Jinan — books full of supplications, du'a, ready to recite. This series draws instead on a different kind of book: Uddat al-Da'i wa Najah al-Sa'i, the Provision of the Supplicant, by the fifteenth-century jurist Ibn Fahd al-Hilli. It teaches nothing to recite. It teaches how to supplicate at all — the etiquette, the conditions, the reasons a prayer seems to go unheard. The premise is a single verse: God says, "Call upon Me, I will answer you", and warns that those too proud to do so are humiliated. Not "ask Me" — "call Me". An open line, day or night, with no fixed hour or form. This session sets out why that distinction matters: that supplication is not a transaction reserved for crisis, but the ordinary language of a lover speaking to the Beloved, as constant and involuntary as dhikr, remembrance, itself. It closes with a promise about the shape of the whole series to come — the conditions for a prayer's acceptance, the states of the one who supplicates, the etiquette of asking, and eventually the great supplications themselves: Kumayl, al-Iftitah, Abu Hamza al-Thumali, and more. What does it mean to call on someone who never once refuses to listen? What the evening covers The source text. Uddat al-Da'i, Ibn Fahd al-Hilli's six-part manual on the ethics and rulings of supplication — not a prayer book, but a guide to praying. The opening verse. "Call upon Me, I will answer you", and what it means that God says "call", not "ask". Supplication as love. Why dua is described as a dialogue between lover and Beloved, not a request list. The roadmap ahead. The six sections of the book the series will work through, from definitions to etiquette to the great supplications of the Ahl al-Bayt.

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Sermon: An Introduction

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