The first counsel: the Prophet said, “Fear Allah wherever you are.” God-fearingness (taqwā) is to shun the prohibited matters and carry out the commanded ones—that is the very essence of taqwā. It means that you do what Allah has ordered, in pure devotion to Him and in conformity with the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—and that you abandon what He has forbidden, submitting to His prohibition and honoring His sacred limits.
Accordingly, you establish what Allah has made obligatory upon you in the greatest pillar of Islam after the two testimonies—namely, the prayer. You perform it in full, observing its conditions, pillars, and obligations, and you perfect it with its supplemental elements. Whoever omits anything of the prayer’s conditions, obligations, or pillars has not feared Allah; rather, his taqwā is deficient in proportion to what he has neglected of Allah’s command in his prayer.
In zakāt, fearing Allah means that you accurately calculate all of the wealth on which zakāt is due and pay it willingly, with a contented heart, free of stinginess, parsimony, or delay. Whoever does not do so has not feared Allah.
In fasting, you observe the fast as you have been commanded, avoiding idle talk, obscenity, loud argument, backbiting, tale-bearing, and anything else that diminishes the fast and strips it of its spirit and true meaning—which is abstaining from what Allah the Exalted has forbidden.
The same applies to the rest of the obligations: you fulfill them in obedience to Allah, in submission to His command, with sincerity toward Him, and in imitation of His Messenger. Likewise, with respect to the prohibitions, you leave whatever Allah has forbidden, complying with His prohibition: wherever He has forbidden, you desist.
The second counsel: “Follow up a bad deed with a good one and it will erase it.” That is, whenever you commit a sin, follow it with a good deed, for good deeds wipe away evil deeds. Among the greatest good deeds after a misdeed is that you repent to Allah from it, for repentance is one of the finest of good deeds. Allah the Almighty says, “Indeed, Allah loves those who repent and He loves those who purify themselves” (Qur’an 2:222), and Allah, the Exalted, also says: