Old Age: Consoling Hopes

Then I turned to my left, toward the future, seeking a remedy. But the future appeared to me as a vast, dark graveyard awaiting me, my contemporaries, and all the generations of humanity yet to come. Instead of the comfort of familiarity, it filled me with dread.

Having looked to the right and left in dread, I turned my gaze toward the present. Through the gaze of heedlessness, which saw everything merely as part of the passing course of history, the present day appeared to me as a coffin bearing my body, struggling in the throes of death.

Finding no hope in the present either, I raised my head and looked toward the crown of the tree of my life. There I saw but a single fruit hanging from its branches: my own corpse, looking down upon me.

This too afforded me no consolation. So I lowered my gaze toward the roots of the tree of my life. There I saw that the soil beneath my feet, mingled with the dust of my bones and the earth from which I had originated, was being trampled underfoot. Far from bringing healing, this only deepened my pain.

Then, driven by my distress, I looked behind me. There I saw the transient world, devoid of any firm foundation, passing toward nothingness and sinking into the darknesses of non-existence. I sought a balm for my pain, but found only poison that intensified my suffering.

Finding no relief there either, I looked ahead toward the near future. There, directly in my path, I saw the gate of the grave standing open, its mouth gaping toward me. Beyond it stretched the road to eternity, along which I could see caravans journeying in the distance.

Confronted by all these terrors on six sides, I had nothing in my hands but my small and feeble free will, my only support and means of defence. Yet this free will—the human being's only weapon against countless enemies and innumerable harms—is deficient, powerless, and weak, possessing no creative power. It can do no more than choose.

It can neither return to the past to soothe the sorrows arising from it nor reach into the future to ward off the fears that come from there. I saw that it was utterly powerless before the anxieties and longings bound up with the past and the future.

While I was thus struggling amid the darknesses, fears, and despair surrounding me on all six sides, suddenly the light of īmān, shining in the heavens of the Miraculous Qur’an, hastened to my aid.

It illuminated those six directions with such power that, even had the fears and darknesses I had beheld been a hundred times greater, that light would still have sufficed to dispel them. It transformed every terror into consolation and every sense of estrangement into companionship.

Indeed, īmān tore apart the image of the past as a vast graveyard and showed me, with the certainty of ayn al-yaqīn and haqq al-yaqīn, that the past was in reality a luminous abode where friends are reunited.

Likewise, īmān showed me, with the certainty of ilm al-yaqīn, that the future, which through the gaze of heedlessness had appeared as a vast graveyard, was in reality a banquet of the All-Merciful, spread within the delightful palaces of bliss.

Furthermore, īmān shattered the image of the present which, through the gaze of heedlessness, had appeared as a coffin, and showed me that the present day was in reality a marketplace of trade for eternity and a splendid guesthouse of the All-Merciful.