Did You Won Worldly Happiness, And You Get Delusions?
- My well-educated friend said with a note of joyous triumph: We may disagree widely and argue for a long time. However, we inevitably come off the better from our fight with you. We won the happiness of this world while you emerge only with a few delusions in your heads. What is the use of talking when we have won the lion's share of this world's pleasures? We have enjoyed parties to the small hours, drinking, beautiful women, luxurious living, and all sorts of pleasures untarnished by the taboos of the forbidden or haram. You, for your part, have only got your fasting, prayers, remembrance of God, and the fear of Reckoning.
Who do you think is the real winner?
- I am ready to concede that victory to you if you have gained your happiness as you say. If, however, we patiently consider the truth of the matter together, we will find that the picture you draw of happiness- midnight parties, drinking, pleasures unmolested by fear of the prohibition taboo — is true misery in essence.
- How is that?
- Such life is, in truth, slavery to insatiable appetites that are no sooner satisfied than hunger again for more. If they are sated, they grow dull and weary, and you fall into inactivity and sluggishness.
Are the embraces of women the right place to find lasting happiness in? We know that affections fluctuate, that passion is volatile, and mere words of praise seduce those beautiful women. The stories of lovers tell only of unhappiness which is exacerbated and crowned with more significant disappointments if the infatuation ends in marriage. For in that latter estate, each party will miss in the other the desired perfections he imagined were there. After the lust is slaked and the desire abates, each will come to see the other's defects blown large as if through a magnifying glass.
What about great wealth? It is merely another form of slavery. The wealthy are put in the service of their riches; they are enslaved in aggrandizing, collecting, and guarding them, thus becoming their servants in a reversal of the normal, or at least expected, course of events.
What about power and glory? Aren't they, in essence, pitfalls leading to arrogance and tyranny. The person in power is like a rider on a lion: today, he has the reins in his hand, but tomorrow he is eaten by the beast that carries him.
And are wine, drugs, gambling, lechery, and secret sex unhampered by fear of the unlawful aspects of happiness?
They are, in truth, but forms of escape from the mind, from conscience, from the spirit's yearning and human responsibility by drowning oneself in the fire of lust and the rabidness of appetites. Is this a higher style of life or a deterioration back to the hoarding of apes and the copulation of animals?
The Quran has hit on the perfect truth when it describes the 'unbelievers.'
“The unbelievers take their fill of pleasures and eat as the beasts eat; but Hell shall be their home”. Muhammad, 12
It is not denied that the unbelievers enjoy their life, but this joy is like that of animals. Is it really a form of happiness?
This lust life is only a series of stimulated desires, tensions, consuming hunger, and gorging surfeit. It has no relation to true happiness, which can only be attained in a state of psychic peace and relief and spiritual liberation from all kinds of slavery. In its final definition, true happiness is a state of harmony between man and his soul, the others, and God.
This reconciliation, peace, and sense of internal tranquility can only be reached through a certain expenditure of effort when man devotes his strength, wealth, and health to the service of others, when he lives in intention and deed a life of goodness and charity, and when his relationship with God is deepened by prayer and reverence reciprocated from the Divine by Help, Light, and Tranquility.
Such happiness is the essence of religion. Didn't the mystic in his rags cry out,
“We live in such bliss that kings would fight us with swords for it if they but know how it is”.
Those who tasted that bliss, the bliss of contact with God and peace with the self, know that the mystic is quite right.
- But weren't you just a few years ago 'one of us' drinking and painting the town red as we used to do? Didn't you express atheistic ideas in your book God and Man, which outreached even the most disbelieving in its audacity? What set you on the opposite course?
- God, may He be exalted, changes but is Himself not changed.
- I know that you attribute everything to God's grace. But what was your role or effort in that transformation?
- I looked around me and found that death and dust are absurd and meaningless jests. I saw the universe where I live precisely and accurately governed with no room for aberration or disorder.
If my life was meaningless and destined for nothingness, as the 'absurdists' imagine, why is it, then, that I weep, repent, or feel a burning yearning for truth and justice willing to sacrifice my life and blood for such values.
I saw the stars moving in their orbs by law; communities of insects talking; plants seeing, hearing, and feeling. I saw that animals have “ethics”; that the human brain, the wonder of wonders, contains more than ten thousand million nerve connections, all working at the same time in a miraculous perfection. If just one fault occurred here or there, it would immediately result in paralysis, blindness, loss of speech, mental confusion, or hallucination.
Such defects, however, are only exceptional. What power, then, maintains the safety of this enormous machine, and who endowed it with all those perfections?
I saw beauty in the leaves of trees, in the feathers of peacocks, and the wings of butterflies. I heard delightful music in the chanting of hoops and the chattering of birds.
Wherever I turn my face, I see the brush strokes of a painter, the designs of intelligence, and the creations of an inventive hand.
I observed in nature an integrated, accurately wrought structure in which everything coincidental or haphazard is impossible. Every phenomenon cries out, 'I have been planned by a designer and created by a Puissant Creator.'
I read the Quran and found a resonance and rhythm unknown in a familiar language in my ears. It staggered my mind.
It delivers the conclusive word in everything that touches upon the state, morals, legislation, the universe, life, the self, and society, despite being revealed more than one thousand four hundred years ago.
The Quran accords with all that science discovered or invented, although it was brought to the world by an illiterate bedouin from a backward nation that did not know the light of civilization.
I read that man's history and deeds, and I concluded that he was a prophet. He could not have been a prophet, and the Puissant God could not have created this fantastic universe the Quran mentioned and described His works.
Having listened attentively to all I said, my friend spoke, trying desperately to feel his way to the last breach through which he can demolish my arguments:
- What would happen if all your expectations are erroneous and you end up, after a long life, I hope, in dusty death that has nothing beyond it?
I would not have lost anything! I would certainly have enjoyed as full, happy, and eventful a life as can be. It is you, however, who will lose much if my beliefs are right and my expectations come true. I assure you, my friend, that they are true and that you will have a tremendous surprise.
While I was addressing him, I looked intently at his eyes and saw a flood of terror flowing from them for the first time. His lids were twitching and convulsing.
It was, however, a transient moment of fear. He soon regained his composure. But this was enough for me to realize that for all his arrogance, stubbornness, and obstinacy, he was standing precariously on the edge of a precipice of doubts, emptiness, and nihilism clutching at nothing.
- He resumed talking in a voice that he endeavored to charge with certainty:
You shall see that dust is all that awaits you or us.
- Are you sure of that?
And for the second time, terror flooded his eyes.
-Yes.
He replied, stressing every sound of the word as if fearing that his accent may give him away.
- You are lying. This is a matter of which we can never be sure.
After our long conversation that night, I returned home alone. I knew that I had opened a wound in his soul. I had undermined his crumbling philosophy and the holes will grow more gaping with time. His weak logic will not be able to mend them.
I whispered a prayer for him, hoping that his terror may yet save him, for when all paths for the entry of truth are barred with obstinacy, fear may be the only path left.
I knew well that his guidance was not in my power. Didn't God say to His Prophet:
“You do not guide whomever you will but God guides whomever He pleases” Al-Qasas 56
But I hoped and prayed that my friend sees the light of faith.
There is no sin or fate worse than disbelief.
I’m inviting you to listen to the below part of the Holy Quran, and then you judge by yourself: