The objective of dhikr and of the dhikr that you have just done is if you like, a loosening up or a shaking off of our ideas of who we are, of our chains. It is about re-orientating oneself to the Lord, to Allah.

One can’t have a sense but end up recognizing that you are pickled, quite literally pickled, in blessing. The interesting thing, of course, is that most of us don’t experience it like that. Most of us don’t experience a sense of security, a sense of fulfilment as our basic condition.

In Surah Alam Nasrah, Allah subhana wa taala reassures us that in difficulty there's ease. We often think of this as subsequently to difficulty there's ease. But there's at least one way of reading this that suggests that the difficulty itself is the ease.