The Book of Life

INSIGHTS OF THE WISE method of life that he adopted in the beginning, and he is now enjoying a prosperous and successful life. Now take the opposite example. Another man received a lump sum of one lakh rupees as his share of inheritance. With this, he opened a cloth shop. The shop quickly became successful. But after a few years, it collapsed. The reason was that he failed to understand the difference between sales and profit. For example, if goods worth 5,000 rupees were sold in his shop, 4,500 rupees of that was the cost, and only 500 rupees was the actual profit. But he began spending the entire 5,000 as if it were income. Clearly, this was the worst kind of extravagance. Within a few years, he went bankrupt. In this world, a life of prudence is another name for prosperity. A life without prudence is another name for misery. DO NOT BE WASTEFUL A ccording to one narration, the Prophet of Islam () said: “It is wasteful to eat everything you crave” (Sunan Ibn Majah, Hadith No. 3352). Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph, expressed the same idea in these words: “It is enough wastefulness for a person that he eats everything he desires” (Al-Zuhd wa al-Raqa’iq by Ibn al-Mubarak, Report No. 769).