We need to make sure that worship acts that we engage in are proper. Don’t rush in an act of worship, take it easy; take your time, have a moment for Allah. So, make sure to take your time in your prayer that you read (the obligatory and the extra).

The companions used to read beautiful salah. There are so many stories of the companions when the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) told them to pray as though it’s the last prayer.

The Angel of Death is waiting for you to finish your Salah and you’re going! Imagine if that was the case, what type of prayer would you read?

 So read the Salah like that of the companions. We have something to learn from them. They used to perfect it as best as they could.

What about us?

How to Have Focus in Prayer

In order to concentrate in prayer, you need to rid your mind and your heart of haram and unnecessary things. We have a mind and a heart similar to a computer or the memory of your phone, if your memory is 64 GB in your phone and you have unnecessary things you are downloading every day, then when you want to download something necessary, two things happen:

1- Your hard drive is full.

2- The phone slows down so much.

 You press a button and you wait maybe longer for this application to open because you’ve got too much unnecessary things.

Indeed the same thing happens to your brain and to your heart. There are too much unnecessary things: argument with this guy, you have a deal with this guy that went sour, you have some problem with this, you have pornography in the head, you have music and all the other things piled up. How are you going to memorize Quran?

We know all of those Bollywood songs, Hollywood songs by heart, but we make mistakes when we read Quran.

So, this is why we say rid your mind and heart of sinful and unnecessary things.

Take it out, you will find your processing speed becomes quick. When you say, “Allahu Akbar”, your concentration is in prayer.

Why?

Because I don’t have too much of unnecessary things happening outside the prayer.

But if there are unnecessary things, the minute you say, “Allahu Akbar”, your mind first goes, “hey you know, this morning I saw a very nice car!”

You’re supposed to be listening to the Imam saying, “guide us to the Straight Path,” and you’re saying ‘ameen’ by default, not because you concentrated in the prayer. This means that your mind is somewhere else.

Let us realize this. Let us understand gaining closeness to Allah, be happy with the decree of Allah, strive towards pleasing Allah.