Al-Risala (English), July 1986

Testing time.

1986 7 July 5 Testing time. (19) Ibn Abdul Bar has written that it is at times of anger that a person’s patience can be gauged.

Wealth

1986 7 July 5 Wealth (350) The great Deceiver “It is not poverty that I fear for you,” the Prophet Mohammad once addressed his followers. “What I fear for you is that you should have too much access to worldly wealth, as happened to communities that passed before you; and you become emulous of it, as was the case with them.” This Hadith, reported by Amr ibn Auf, has been propounded in both Bukhari and Muslim, the two main collections of traditions of the Prophet.

What the Prophet warned of, we have seen happening in recent decades all over the Muslim world. The Muslim have had worldly wealth lavished upon them and with it have been put to a severe test. In far-off lands, they had palatial houses to live in, limousines to drive, inflated bank balances to draw on, credit cards to keep them in luxury in any corner of the globe. All these things, and much else besides, have come with the accumulation of worldly wealth.

The trouble with great wealth is that it is all too often bought at the price of personal integrity. All too often it proves the great deceiver, tainting one’s vision and preventing one from seeing things as they truly are. What is before our eyes today, we come to think of as permanent; but it will be gone tomorrow.

For this reason, worldly wealth has no value in itself. Let’s look at the matter in everyday terms. If one has a certificate of loyalty to America, for instance, it will not be of any use to one in the Soviet Union, because loyalty to the former indicates disloyalty to the latter. So it is with this world and the next. Great expertise in worldly affairs will be of no avail when one stands before God in the next world.

Then it will only be realities which count. What a pity it is that man is lost in his own illusions, that he is allowing himself to go astray in what is, after all, only a transitory phase of his existence, quite unmindful of the fact that what awaits him is eternity.