MAN, KNOW THYSELF — Purpose of Life

utters the word of command, the whole record will be played back to us. On hearing it people will involuntarily say, “What sort of a book is this which has omitted neither the smallest nor the gravest of matters?” (THE QURAN 18: 49) A Last Word Just think over everything described above for a few minutes. You are destined for an extremely long and unbroken lifespan. Death is by no means the termination of this life: It is the commencement of a new era. Death is simply the dividing-point between the two stages of our life. Take the farmer’s planting of a crop as an example. He invests his capital in it and cultivates it, until such times as the crop ripens and dries up. Then he harvests it so that he can use the grain and store it up for his year’s requirements. Harvest is the end of one phase in the crops' development, during which time planting and cultivation had taken place. Before the cutting of the crop there had been only toil and expense; it is afterwards that he will enjoy the fruits of his efforts. God, wishing to put us to the test, has not divulged the secrets of life after death to us, but has spread His signs throughout the world. Such is the case with our life also. In this world we are investing in and cultivating our afterworld crop. Each one of us owns a field which is either being cultivated or left barren. We have used a seed which is either productive or mediocre. After sowing our crop, we have either attended to it or neglected it. Either we have cultivated thorns, or else flowers and fruits have blossomed in our garden. We have either expended our energies on the improvement of our crop, or we have wasted our time in unnecessary and irrelevant occupations. The period of preparation of this crop lasts until death. The day of our death is harvest-day. When our eyes close on this world, they will open on the afterlife, and there, the crop which we have been busy cultivating all our lives will appear before us. Remember that the person who does the farming is the one who does the harvesting, and he will reap only the crop that he has sown. Likewise in the afterworld, everybody will reap the harvest he had prepared for himself prior to his death. Every farmer knows full well that he will take as much grain to the granary as he has grown, and that the crop can never