So assist me in obeying You...

So assist me in obeying You, and grant me success in fulfilling what You have made incumbent upon me of all that which pleases You. Indeed I have seen no one who has been able to attain {even} part of Your obedience except that it was through your blessing on him before his obedience.

So endow me with a blessing through which I may attain your pleasure and Heaven.’ Thereafter, pray for your need, I hope that He will not disappoint you, by His will.”[^2] With regard to the etiquettes ( adab ) of supplication, Imam as-Sadiq (‘a) says: “Observe the etiquettes of prayer ( du’a’ ), and see who you are calling and how you are calling, and why you are calling.

Realize the greatness of Allah and His magnificence, and know from the bottom of your heart that He is aware of what is in your conscience, knows your innermost secret, and what transpires in it of the right and wrong. Know the ways of your salvation and destruction, so that you may not pray to Allah for something in which there is your perdition, thinking that your salvation lies in it.

Allah, the All-mighty, the Majestic, says: ‘Man prays for ill as {avidly as} he prays for good, and man is overhasty.’ [^3] Ponder on what you are asking for, and why are you asking for it. Prayer ( du’a’ ) is the responding of your whole to Allah ( al-haqq ), and the annihilation of the self in gazing at the Lord, and leaving the choice ( ikhtiyar ) altogether {to Him}, and the submission of all affairs to Allah, the manifest of it and the occult.

If you do not fulfill the requisites of prayer, then do not wait for the response, for indeed He knows the secret and what is still more hidden; and you may pray for something the contrary of which He has come to know from your innermost secret.”[^4] These two narrations point to the requisites ( shurut ) of the acceptance of a prayer and its etiquettes ( adab ). I was intending to initially talk about the requisites of prayer and thereafter about its etiquettes.

But I encountered some difficulties in the demarcation between the requisites ( shurut ) and the etiquettes ( adab ), hence, I chose to merge the two together. Here, I will quickly point to a set of requisites and etiquettes related to prayer in the light of the Islamic narrations. Recognition of Allah One of the most significant requisites for the acceptance of a prayer is the knowledge of Allah, and belief in His absolute power and strength in actualizing what His servant asks from Him.