Man and God

Minarets of Worldly Glory keep you happy only just for a day, at the very most. And then the Angel of Death will suddenly arrive and grab you, and all your wealth or the army that you have mustered to protect you will not be able to save you. Death overtakes everyone – rich and poor alike. It enters triumphantly into both palace and hovel. Death is a person’s greatest compulsion. Death reminds a person to rise up beyond ‘today’ and to think of ‘tomorrow’ – of the eternal world after death. It tells an individual to search for success on the other side of life – in the world to come. A truly successful person is one who draws this lesson from death. If you remain deprived of this lesson, your joys, which you wallow in in this world, will soon be snuffed out and after death you will find yourself in utter darkness. Minarets of Worldly Glory O nce, I struck up a conversation with a man who, some 30 years earlier, had been an ordinary mechanic. When I met him, he had become the owner of several factories. I remarked, ‘Your business has expanded quite considerably!’ He very happily replied, ‘I’ve earned so much that even if my children don’t work, they can comfortably eat for a hundred years!’ Now, this is an extreme example. However, today everyone’s case is similar to this in some sense. Everyone is confident that he has ‘settled’ his matters once and for all, and that he is now free of any danger for at least a ‘hundred years’.