Is ‘ibādah Essence Of The Religion?

I am an engineer and I have built several things. The essence of that engineering has always been to create a manifestation of ones knowledge and prowess with an expected result being the betterment of humanity through its proper use. The purpose or objective being to do something useful either quicker, faster, cheaper or more efficiently, an engineer never designs or builds anything to praise his prowess. With that humanly context in mind, I feel I need a little more elaboration on worship of Allah being the essence of the religion.

God the Almighty does not need us to worship him. On the contrary it is us who need to worship Him. We need to worship Him because only by worshiping Him we will be able to purify ourselves and therefore make ourselves qualified enough to get close to Him who is the source of excellence and to be in His everlasting paradise.

When you worship some one you will try to do your best to do what he likes you to do and to refrain from what he does not like you to do. Since God is the source of all the good and excellence naturally the one who worships Him will also be in the path of excellence.

Another point is that worshipping God is not simply limited to (say) five daily Prayers and fasting a month every year. The verse that refers to worshiping as the purpose of creation of human being (51:56) uses the verb ‘Ya’budūn‘. ‘Ya’budūn‘ comes from the root ‘abada’ which refers to ‘being a servant of some one’ and from here we will have ‘Abd/Ibad’ which is servant/s. The point I am trying to make is that the ritual worshiping is only the formal demonstration of us being servant of God. In a way, our ritual worshiping is a manifestation of us being His servants. We need to feel and act as His servant all the time in our daily life in order to make this manifestation (worshiping Him) as satisfactory as possible.

Therefore when we read that the aim of creation is to worship God we need to realise and appreciate the deep and the vast meaning and implication of the statement.

So to summarise this is the way we can think about it:

God created us from absolute nothing to give us a chance to become good enough (purified enough) to get close to Him and to stay close to Him in His heaven. We can get good enough (purified enough) by worshiping (‘Ibādah of) Him which is a manifestation of being His true servant in all aspects of our life.

There is no feeling more powerful, more assuring and more peaceful than the feeling of being a servant of ‘the Lord and the Creator of the world’.

When God refers to some of the greatest human beings in the face of Earth (Ibrāhīm, Isḥāq, Ya’qūb), He refers to them with the word ‘ibādinā’ (our servants), 38:45.

I would like to invite you to check out and think about a number of verses in the Qur’ān that can be used as support and evidence of the above points:

There is a close link between what makes us successful in the hereafter, that is purification, and worshiping God: 87:14-15

God talks about His true servants with a sense of pride. Being His true servant is in fact a privilege: 17:1, 25:63, 38:45, 89:29, 38:41, 54:9, 19:2, 18:1

There is a close link between worshiping God and what the Qur’ān refers to as adopting His colour: 2:138

There is a negative link between worshiping God and arrogance: 40:60

There is a negative link between being God’s servant and being deceived by Satan or to follow him or his agents: 17:65, 16:36