Bismillāh.
إِنَّ الصَّلَاةَ تَنْهَىٰ عَنِ الْفَحْشَاءِ وَالْمُنكَرِ ۗ وَلَذِكْرُ اللَّهِ أَكْبَرُ ۗ وَاللَّهُ يَعْلَمُ مَا تَصْنَعُونَ
Indeed the prayer restrains from indecent and wrongful conduct, and the remembrance of Allah is surely greater. And Allah knows whatever [deeds] you do.
Sūrat al-‘Ankabūt, No. 29, Āyat 45
After mentioning an important consequence of prayer, that is that prayer restrains from indecent actions, the above verse from Surat al-‘Ankabūt goes on to say that “the dhikr of Allah is surely greater.” What does the word dhikr mean exactly? Moreover, what exactly is Allah ‘azza wa jall saying? What is dhikr greater than? These are some questions that may arise from the above verse.
Dhikr is an action of the soul. At times the word is used in the sense of remembering and recalling something that had been stored in the memory earlier. Before the act of dhikr it was buried deep in the soul and could have been forgotten, but by the act of dhikr it is brought out from the memory storage and is now present. At other times the word dhikr is used in a different manner which is not totally unrelated to the first usage: here it is not about memory and something prone to being forgotten, rather the focus is on thinking about something or uttering it on one’s tongue. For example, it could be said that the dhikr of God is either in one’s heart or upon one’s tongue.
In different verses of the Qur’an, prayer has been referred to as being dhikr. For example:
إِذٰا نُودِيَ لِلصَّلاٰةِ مِنْ يَوْمِ اَلْجُمُعَةِ فَاسْعَوْا إِلىٰ ذِكْرِ اَللّٰهِ
When the call is made for prayer on Friday, hurry toward the dhikr of Allah. (Q 62:9)
Or elsewhere Allah subhānahu wa ta‘āla says:
وَ أَقِمِ اَلصَّلاٰةَ لِذِكْرِي
and maintain the prayer for My dhikr (Q 20:14)
This makes sense, since prayer contains verbal utterances like hamd and tasbīh which are acts of verbal dhikr. More than this, prayer is an act of worship in which we are turning our attention to Allah. By praying, our heart is engaging in dhikr of Allah. In fact, prayer is the epitome and the ultimate embodiment of God’s worship. As the Messenger of Allah sallāllahu ‘alayhī wa ālih has said: Prayer is the pillar of religion, and it is the first action of the son of Ādam which God will look at.
Going back to the above verse from Surat al-‘Ankabūt, after saying that prayer restrains someone from committing indecent actions, the verse moves to a higher level. It says, “the dhikr of Allah is surely greater.” The idea here is that beyond the level of avoiding sins there is a higher perfection that believers can attain, whereby they are performing the dhikr of Allah. This higher level should be the consequence of prayer, and with the right guidance it can reach higher and lasting levels.
In fact, the ultimate goal and true success of a believer lies in such higher states of dhikr. Islamic mystical poetry uses symbolic language such as wine and drunkenness to refer to such states. At times great scholars of Islam, themselves masters of the traditional and intellectual sciences, have expressed their desire for such states in their poetry. One example of this was Shaykh al-Bahā’ī, who despite being famous for his mastery of traditional sciences such as fiqh and hadīth, had strong inclinations to mysticism and uttered such words in Arabic and Farsi poetry. In one line of poetry, he says:
O people who are in the school
All that you have acquired is but Satanic whispering
If your thinking is about anything other than the Beloved,
You will have no share in the world to come
We pray to Allah by the sake of His noble messenger and his pure progeny to bless us with higher and higher states of dhikr in our life. We beg Him to relieve the Muslims of the suffering they are going through throughout the world.
Sources: ‘Allāmah Muhammad Husayn Tabātabā’ī, Tafsīr al-Mīzān.