will soon destroy your insignificant drunken pleasure of the present. The future too, due to your unbelief, is a non-existent, black, dead, and desolate wasteland. And since the heads of the unfortunates who appear from there, sticking them out into existence while stopping by in the present, are struck off by the executioner’s sword of the appointed hour and thrown into non-existence, due to the concern of your intellect, it continuously rains down grievous worries on your unbelieving head, completely overturning your petty, dissolute pleasure.
If you give up vice and misguidance and enter the sphere of certain, verified belief1 and righteousness, you will see through the light of belief that the past is not non-existent and a graveyard that rots everything, but an existent, light-filled world which is transformed into the future and into a waiting-room for the immortal spirits who will enter palaces of bliss in the future. Since it appears thus, it affords not pain, but according to the strength of belief, a sort of paradaisical pleasure. The future, too, appears to the eye of belief not as a dark wasteland, but where banquets and exhibitions of gifts have been set up in palaces of everlasting bliss by the Most Merciful and Compassionate One of Glory and Bestowal, Whose mercy and munificence are infinite and Who makes the spring and summer into tables laden with bounties. Since, knowing he will be despatched there, a person observes this on the cinema screen of belief, he may experience in a way the pleasures of the eternal realm. All may do this according to their degree. That is to say, true, painfree pleasure is found only in belief in God, and is possible only through belief.
Being related to our discussion, we shall explain here by means of a comparison, which is included in A Guide For Youth as a footnote, only a single benefit and pleasure out of the thousands that belief produces in this world too. It is as follows:
For example, your beloved only child is suffering the pangs of death and you are thinking despairingly of your being eternally parted from him. Then suddenly a doctor like Khidr or Luqman the Wise arrives with a wondrous medicine. Your lovely and lovable child opens his eyes, delivered from death. You can understand what joy and happiness it would give you.
Now, like the child, millions of people whom you earnestly love and are concerned for are —in your view— rotting in the graveyard of the past and are about to be annihilated, when suddenly the reality of belief, like Luqman the Wise, shines a light from the window of heart onto the
For ‘certain, verified belief’ (iman-i tahkikî), see, page 488 footnote 71, and page 568 footnote 1. [Tr.]