The Ihsan Necklace

The Ihsan Necklace August 19, 2011

When I started this blog I thought, “if I just put a link up there in the corner to Etsy, people who read this will see that I’ve got a store front.”  I don’t want to keep mentioning it, because it seems tacky to me.  But, I do have a store front, and I am creating stuff, and well, you might like it!

The newest addition to the shop made its way there through a special order.  A friend of mine asked me to create her a necklace that used the 4 words Hope – Faith – Belief – Patience.  She didn’t know what design she wanted but she trusted me to do the job.  Through some discussion, we came up with this 4 tier design, and her necklace was created!  Forgive me if you’ve seen and heard this story already, but I was so thrilled that I wanted to share it with my friends and family.  Now, after some careful consideration and some praying, I thought I should post it on Etsy and share it with you.

The Ihsan Necklace

After deciding to name this necklace Ihsan, I looked up some more information about the word and found this explanation of the third level of Faith at AlJazeera.Info written by  Hassan El-Najjar.  It fits, I think.

Ihsan is the highest of the three levels of faith and the closest to God. It is to worship Allah as if you are seeing Him. While you do not see Him, He truly sees you. Then, Ihsan means that a Muhsen is sure that Allah is seeing him/her in everything he/she says or does. Therefore, a Muhsen does his/her best to say and do only what pleases God and conforms to His commands. This is the level of righteousness, the level of perfection, the level of doing and saying the ultimate good, the level of Ihsan.

The word “Ihsan” in Arabic is a derivative of the verb “ahsana,” which means doing things better. Thus the literal linguistic meaning of Ihsan is doing the best, which is doing what God commanded us to do.

*Muhsen = beneficent person


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