Old Age: Consoling Hopes

I said to myself, “Since this world contains such unbearable, heart-rending, and searing separations, death is surely preferable to life. A life burdened with such grievous suffering is more than one can bear.”

At that moment, I turned my gaze in all six directions, but everywhere I saw only darkness. Through the heedlessness brought on by the intensity of my grief, the world appeared terrifying, empty, and desolate, as though it were about to collapse upon my head.

My soul sought a firm point of support against the countless calamities and afflictions advancing upon it like enemies. It yearned for a source of help capable of satisfying its boundless longing for eternity, and sought consolation for the sorrow arising from endless separations, losses, devastation, and death.

Then, suddenly, the truth of the following Qur’anic verses was disclosed to me:

سَبَّحَ لِلّٰهِ مَا فِى السَّمٰوَاتِ وَالْاَرْضِ وَهُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الْحَكِيمُ ۞ لَهُ مُلْكُ السَّمٰوَاتِ وَالْاَرْضِ يُحْيى وَيُمِيت وَهُوَ عَلٰى كُلِّ شَىْءٍ قَدِيرٌ

All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifies Allah, and He is the All-Mighty, the All-Wise. To Him belongs the sovereignty of the heavens and the earth. He gives life and causes death, and He has power over all things.

Through this truth, I was delivered from that painful, terrifying vision, darkened by separation and sorrow, and my eyes were opened.

I saw the fruits hanging from the branches of the trees looking upon me, as it were, with smiling faces, as though they were saying:

“Look at us too! Do not gaze only upon the ruins.”

And the meaning of those exalted verses awakened within me the following reflection:

Why are you so deeply grieved that the terrible flood of the Russian invasion has erased a letter fashioned by human hands in the form of a city upon the page of the plain of Van?

Look instead to the Eternal Maker, the True Owner, the Creator and Lord of all existence. See how He continues to inscribe His letters—His creatures—upon the page of the plain of Van in all their splendour, just as He did in former times.

Your weeping over those deserted and ruined places arises from forgetting their True Owner, from failing to recognise that human beings are merely guests, and from mistakenly imagining that they themselves were the true owners of those places.

Yet through that very error and the burning anguish it occasioned, a door to truth was opened. My soul became fully prepared to receive that truth.

Just as iron is placed in the fire to soften it, so that it may be fashioned into a beautiful and useful form, so too did that sorrowful and terrifying experience soften my soul as though in a furnace.

Through the truth of the verses mentioned above, the Qur’an revealed to my soul, in all its fullness, the blessing contained in the truths of īmān, and enabled it to receive them.