👤 Ḥabīb Aḥmad Mashhūr al-Ḥaddād (Author), Mostafa al-Badawi (Translator)
About the Book
Key to the Garden is an elaborate exposition of the Prophet Muḥammad’s teaching that the inner life must pass through three stages: affirmation of faith with the tongue, then the mind, and finally the heart. The Muslim Testimony of Faith, that “there is no deity save God,” is at once the essence and the highest principle of Islam. This book is a demonstration, by one of the greatest recipients of the Prophet’s heritage of knowledge, of how the whole spectrum of Islamic thought and worship unfolds naturally from these few words.
It is now forty years since this book was written, twenty since it was translated into English, and twelve since the translation was first published. The issues that had caused the author so much concern at the time have become, without exception, all the more pressing today.
The need to convey the Islamic concept of Tawḥīd to the world at large in clear unequivocal terms has been and shall remain the Muslim’s first duty. Now that there is renewed worldwide attention toward Islam, it has become even more urgent to convey its core concept, without which there is no religion: the Oneness of God.
About the Author
Ḥabīb Aḥmad Mashhūr al-Ḥaddād was widely acknowledged as among the leading scholars and spiritual masters of the twentieth century. He was born in a town in Hadramawt, in southern Arabia. At an early age he committed the Qurʿān to memory and spent most of his time in the relentless pursuit of the various branches of religious knowledge.
He dedicated his life to teaching and spreading the word of Islam. This present books is his most celebrated and is widely read. He died in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, December 6, 1995, and was buried in cemetery near Makkah.
About the Translator
Mostafa al-Badawi is one of the world’s premier translators of Islamic spiritual texts. He is a Consultant Psychiatrist and member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He studied under many shaykhs, foremost among whom is the late Ḥabīb Aḥmad Mashhūr al-Ḥaddād.