And all praise belongs to God, who has made us self-sufficient through His sharia—a law that calls to wisdom and kindly exhortation, enjoins justice and benevolence, and forbids indecency, wrongdoing, and oppression. His is the favor and bounty for the grace He has poured upon us and by which He has preferred us over every other nation; and to Him we earnestly turn, asking that He inspire us to thank Him for this blessing and that He open for us the gates of repentance, forgiveness, and mercy.

The most beloved means of drawing near to the Beneficent (1) is to appeal to Him by His very beneficence and to acknowledge that the entire matter is nothing but His sheer favor and gracious gift.

He holds over us the all-embracing blessing (2) just as He holds over us the decisive proof: we confess the favors He has granted us, and we confess our sins, our slips, our ignorance, our wrongdoing, and our excesses in all our affairs.

This is the scant provision we carry; His blessings and the obligations that accompany them, together with our sins, have left (3) us no good deed (through which we hope) (4) for winning reward and escaping painful punishment.

Indeed, some of that alone consumes (5) all our good deeds and absorbs every act of obedience (6).

That would still be the case even if those deeds were free of impurities, performed purely for His sake, and carried out in accordance with His command (7).

Yet—by God—our only recourse is to clutch at the hems of His pardon, think well of Him, flee from Him to Him, and seek refuge (8)