Bismillahi rahmani raheem, assalamu alaikum
My Grandmother who I hardly saw before her passing gave me one piece of advice in my life, she told me how the fitnah gripping this world began after she realised I was aware of what was happening. The Sufi’s in history were people who controlled life from the spiritual world, when they saw a wrong they would right it using Ghayb. They could command a person’s nafs to behave a certain way, either as punishment, or baraka, they could open and close for people avenues in life but their where rules to this set out by Allah so you didn’t affect a person’s ability make choices for themselves or hurt their psychology.
Sufi’s understood the laws governing the spiritual part of the universe, when to use these gifts and when not to and they lived by these standards of Ihsan. But as time went on as each sufi would teach these abilities to their students or children, each successive generation would be less deserving than the last of having them, so slowly over time they would forget about the rules governing these gifts and use them for increasingly selfish reasons.
Imagine going from someone as Immaculate as Abu Bakr (ra) to someone like the shuyukh we see today over the generations and you get the idea of the type of people this was passed down to by the end.
At the start the Sufi’s would test if their child was deserving of receiving them, if not they would never hear about them, this stopped corruption and fitnah from spreading.
By the end when the Islamic empire was collapsing around the world the last remnants of these sufi’s who still held the standards surrounding these gifts, who were at the limit of the type of people deserving of them, because of the wars decided to give them to all of their children regardless of if they deserved them or not thinking they would fight the war with them and win.
But weakness in character also meant no spine or back bone, and soon fitnah and corruption spread around the world as these Muslims sold the secrets of Islam to the Kufar who are now using them on the world.
I can quote a few things from Islamic literature about this, the Naqshbandi awliyah are famous for having these gifts and the ability to get to any persons heart, what I am referring to is something lessor than this but essentially the same thing. Even in modern culture this is referred to indirectly, because they can’t speak openly about it they use metaphor’s to speak and express what they are referring to, I will quote one thing that will give you the best sense of all this, a Movie called The Adjustment Bureau.
This fitnah is the basis for the what the Dajjaal (Allah’s curse be upon him) will do to the world, we went from living by rules that governed the use of these gifts to reprogramming people all together without a second thought.
Allah’s curse is upon every person who uses these gifts today, it isn’t anything but sihr when you don’t follow the rules of the Mala’ikah that governed their use. One punishment I know these people will suffer in Jahanam is that Jahanam will do their thinking for them and make all their choices, their minds and self will be wiped because they are not deserving of having the ability to choose anything in their life, even in a place like this.
When you take from man the very reason Allah put Him on this earth for, on a global scale, Allah will wipe out the world to reassert His order, that is what we are going to see when Isa (as) returns.
Shaykh Rami Al Rifai.