Excerpt from an article: "Reviving Spirituality"

وَيَسْأَلُونَكَ عَنِ الرُّوحِ قُلِ الرُّوحُ مِنْ أَمْرِ رَبِّي وَمَا أُوتِيتُم مِّن الْعِلْمِ إِلاَّ قَلِيلاً

"And they ask you about the ruh. Say: The ruh is one of the commands of my Lord, and you are not given aught of knowledge but a little." 

[Al-Israa, 17:85]

The concept of spirituality can only refer to two matters, the reality of the created i.e. Who created all the creation and the relationship between the Creator and the created, or/and it can be the ruh, translated often as 'soul'.  Islam enables us to reach spiritual highs by worshipping God; as we earn the joy of closeness to Him, His friendship and His love, and hence progress through the stages of perfection in our character. Spirituality requires 4 things:

1. Faith that Allah alone is the Master; seeking His pleasure is the aim of all endeavors; and His commands alone are the commands that are to be obeyed. 

2. Obedience which makes the man give up his independence and accept subservience to Allah.

3. Taqwa; the state of readiness to undertake all that Allah has commanded and lastly,

4. Godliness. Man should not only avoid evil, for it displeases his Lord, but should also use all his powers to eradicate it from the face of the earth.

These concepts enable Muslims to put their complete faith in God and to let their actions be governed by a greater truth and objective. Their objective is to please God and to them the world is nothing more than a field full of opportunities to perform acts that please Allah.

Occasionally, people pray their salah without ever thinking about the words they are reciting and with these words having no impact upon them. This prayer cannot then be described as spiritual because it has become robot-like. It is just the same as eating a certain meal, or going on a train, as there is no link to the purpose of life. A Muslim is he who does actions to seek the pleasure of Allah and to draw nearer to Him.

There was once an incident of a pious man who on hearing that there’ll be no farz salah in heaven, cried with real tears and proclaimed that it was enough for him that he was given a musalah so that he could pray on it and that would be his heaven. SubhanAllah. That was the serenity and pleasure the souls of these great men received on worshipping Allah.

We should all strive to attain such spirituality and to work towards strengthening our imaan and becoming people of taqwa, for it is only then that we will rid ourselves of a spiritual void which people feel even after attaining all forms of worldly pleasures.

Love of God the Almighty gives life to the Heart and sustains the soul. If the heart loses this love, then the loss it suffers is more severe than that of the eye when it is deprived of its sight and the ear when it is deprived of its hearing.

A sage from the early days of Islam (Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak) recited:
You disobey God,
and yet you still claim to love Him.
By God, such behavior is disgusting,
by any standard!
You would have obeyed Him had your love been true.
For the lover is always obedient to the Beloved!

The purpose of this life is the worship and friendship of God. This life is a test for us: will we turn to God, or will we forget Him? This is where life’s struggle has to begin.