A completely revised second edition of a very popular volume. Key to the Garden is an elaborate exposition of the Prophet Muhammad’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.
 

Miftahul Jannah is a classic of Muslim spirituality written by Al-Habib Ahmad Mash-hur al-Haddad. It has been published in the original Arabic by Darul - Hawi in Beirut, Lebanon and has been translated into English by Shaykh Mohamed Mlamali Adam in consultation with Sayyid Omar Abdalla as The Key to Paradise, and this edition by by Dr. Mustafa al-Badawi with the help of Al-Habib himself, as The Key to the Garden.

He is a writer of rigorous precision. Repetitions there are. But the reader must be wary. For they are repetitions designed to stress a fleeting nuance or disposed to combat a latent alterity. In sum, his is an array of qualities as would intimidate the best equipped translator, let alone this one who must confess to a grievous lack of gifts of scholarship and aptitude to match and of self-expression to pair.

But it would be grossly unfair to permit personal inadequacy stand between al-Haddad's readers and al-Haddad's Key. After all, doesn't the old aphorism say that which cannot be delivered measure for measure may be delivered in parts?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad

Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad 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 earl