Riyadat an-Nafs

Assalamu Alaykum, and welcome to my blog!

I am a Jordanian man, who has taken for this blog the pen name Nuruddin Zangi. It is the name of one of my favorite heroes (and role models) from Islamic history. If you want to know more about him (as he’s certainly more interesting than me!), a good place to start would be Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

When I started my original blog (riyada.blogspot.com), I had two goals in mind:

1) To travel the path of self-purification, which is an Islamic science, going back to the Prophet Muhammad- peace be upon him- that was later given the name of Tasawwuf. This involves a training of the mind and soul.
2) To train my body (I was really into bodybuilding/powerlifting/strength training at the time). This was also intended to contribute to attaining goal number one.

So I decided to go with the name Riyadat an-Nafs for my blog.

Riyada in arabic means “training” or “discipline”. It was used by the arabs in relation to horse taming. Sufis refer to their discipline as “riyadat an-nafs”: disciplining the soul / training the ego. Today, the word riyada has come to mean “sports”. There is an Arabic proverb that says: “The purpose of sports (riyada) is not the collection of trophies, but the disciplining of the soul”.

But now I have come to a point on the path where I realized the importance of not over-eating, and you can’t do bodybuilding without overeating. So I had to take the very difficult decision to stop bodybuilding in order to progress on the path of the spirit, and my hope is that a stronger soul will make up for the need for a very strong body.

Now even in the spiritual path there has been a change: I have come to realize that one’s attempts at riyada, while necessary, should not be the main way of progress. Of course there are certain practices like fasting, etc that are very helpful, but there are other simpler things that are far more  effective. You can read more about that in my “Tariqa Muhammadiyya” posts; a link to them could be found under Categories in the right-hand panel.

So you could say that this blog has also evolved, as its new focus is only the spiritual path, and in particular what some have termed “Muhammadan Sufism” and the related Tariqa Muhammadiyya movements.

You will also notice on the right-side hand of the page, but not in the black right-hand panel, some links, or “pages.” Every once in a while I will group a bunch of related posts into one theme and add a page that links to them, sometimes explaining what each post is about. Sometimes I will intentionally start with a page, and then slowly add more links to them until I’m done discussing that topic.

Thank you for visiting.

NZ