Lit. ‘the act of reminding’; ‘remembrance’. The Qur’an exhorts individuals to remember God: ‘Oh ye who believe! Remember (udhkurū) God with much remembrance (dhikran kathīran)’ (Q. 33:41). Dhikr designates a kind of prayer, which consists in the constant repetition of a name or formula. It is performed either in solitude or collectively. For the mystic al-Ḥallāj (d. 922), it is a method that helps the soul to live in God’s presence, another method being fikr (discursive reflection). Later Sufis, such as Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh (d. 1309) emphasised that dhikr is a particular technique that guarantees access to higher states and wrote manuals on how to perform dhikr.
