Al Hayy
The Alive
Exalted and Glorious
His kursi extends over the Heavens and the Earth, and He feels no fatigue in guarding and preserving. And He is the Most High, the Most Great. (2:255)
Allah! La ilaha illa Huwa (none has the right to be worshipped, but He), al-Hayyul-Qayyum (the ever Living, the One Who sustains and protects all that exists. (3:2)
And all faces shall be humbled before Allah, the Ever Living, the One Who sustains and protects all that exists. And he who carried wrongdoing will be indeed a complete failure on that Day. (20:111)
And put your trust in the Ever Living One Who dies not, and glorify His Praises, and Sufficient is He as the All-Knower of the sins of His slaves. (25:58)
He is the Ever Living, La ilaha illa Huwa (none has the right to be worshipped but he); so invoke Him making your worship pure for Him Alone. All the praises and thanks be to Allah, the Lord of the ‘Alamin (mankind, jinn, and all that exists). (40:65)
This name means the Ever-Living, the Deathless, the Eternal, His existence having neither beginning nor end. Allah is the only One Who is Eternal and shall remain forever. He knows, hears, and sees all our good and evil intentions and deeds, and has warned of punishments for vicious and sinful acts.
Allah, the Most High has neither a partner nor an equal. He has no figure, no form, no color, and no parts.
One who repeats this name 101 times will have long life.
Al-Hayy is the Living Purifier of life from the beginning without any beginning or ending. He is the Subsister forever from the world of pre-eternity, and the Ever-Living Who does not die. Al-Hayy is the One Who distinguishes to you that Allah is He Who is longed for in every annihilation in your surrender to all His orders.
From: The Meanings of the Names of Our Lord by Shaykh Muhammad Sa’id al-Jamal ar-Rifa’i Head of the Higher Sufi Council in Jerusalem and the Holy Land Teacher at the Dome of the Rock (al-Aqsa)
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AL-HAYY
Allah is the perfectly alive and ever-living one. He is the source of life in all that is alive. That which is alive is cognizant and active. Allah is cognizant of all, and all actions are His. All that is known and will be known is within His knowledge; all existence is comprehended within His actions at all times.
With the exception of Allah, the life of everything living is held within the limits of its action and its realization. That realization and activity are the signs of life; when they end, life ends. The value of each life is judged by the extent of the knowledge and the activity of the living one. Allah Most High has given lives of different degrees and different kinds to His creatures. The value of a created being is in accordance with the degree of the signs of life in it.
A plant, which is alive, is more valuable than soil or stone. Plants are born, eat, drink, grow, propagate, and die. They also possess knowledge, enabling them to differentiate that which is profitable from that which is harmful for them. They are also active. They seek and find what is needed for their growth and propagation in the air, in the water, and in the depths of the earth. They suck in what they need and they digest it and transform it into food, fruit, remedies, and thousands of things that are beneficial to higher forms of life. Yet they are unaware that there is a higher form of life than theirs.
Life in the animal is more highly developed because the animal sees, hears, and moves. The life of vegetation is inferior to the life of the animal; that is why the animal is the master of vegetation. It steps on it, grazes and eats it. There is also a degree of life superior to that of the animal. The Creator has honored humanity with that superiority.
Human life contains all the qualities of vegetal and animal life, only in perfected form. In addition, the human being has intellect. This intellect with which we have been honored analyzes, compares, concludes, figures out the end at the beginning, and takes action in accordance. We know and act upon our knowledge: that is why we are the masters of this world. The most elementary signs of life are birth, eating and drinking, breathing, growth, and propagation. The higher sign of the higher form of life is to know and to act consciously in accordance with that knowledge.
People also differ one from another in the degree of their aliveness, which is judged by the extent of their knowledge and their action. The lowest degree of knowledge for a human being is the awareness and knowledge of oneself. Whoever does not know himself and is not aware of his own existence might as well be dead. The words of the unconscious living dead are dead and deadly: run away from them. Within the sacred name Hayy, pronounced by people of ma’rifah, true knowledge of reality, to whom the mystery of the Ever-Living One has been divulged, there is life. Hear it form their mouths and let it penetrate into your soul so that you, too, may come alive.
‘Abd al-Hayy is he in whom Allah has killed the worldly desires of his flesh, thus giving him the eternal life of knowing himself.
A believer who recites this Name constantly, if Allah so wills, will have a long and happy life.
If someone is excessively stressed or disturbed, to recite this Name 500 times every day before sunrise may bring peace.
From: The Name & the Named by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti
