The Fifth Issue

The Fifth Issue



As has been explained in A Guide for Youth, youth will no doubt depart [one day]. In the certainty of summer giving way to autumn and winter, and the day turning into evening and night, so will youth transform into old age and death. All of the divinely revealed scriptures have given the glad tidings that should a young person spend his transient, evanescent youth in chastity and goodness, within the sphere of uprightness, he will win a youth that is everlasting and ever-abiding.

[The state of affairs of] one who spends his youth [recklessly and foolishly] indulging in sins [can be understood in the following manner]: Just as a murder of which anger is the cause lasts only a minute but compels one to suffer the torment of a prison sentence that lasts for millions of minutes, so too, any sensible youth in their right mind would confirm with their own experience that the entertainments and pleasures of youth within the unlawful sphere, really cause them to suffer the sorrows of the responsibility of hereafter, agonies of torture in the grave and pains from the loss of these illicit pleasures. Those pleasures also cause one to suffer the gloom of sins and misery of worldly punishments. Apart from all these, any sensible youth would affirm that there exist far more pains and sorrows within that illicit pleasure than that pleasure itself. 

For example, the insignificantly small pleasure hidden in loving the forbidden turns into that of poisonous honey due to many reasons along with the deepest pains of jealousy, the agony of separation and the desperate misery of not being loved back [by that ḥarām lover]. If you want to understand that such young people fall into hospitals because of illnesses brought about by their misuse of their youth, and prisons because of their reckless transgressions, and clubs and bars and places of sin, and grave yards because of distress and depression stemming from the absence of nourishment for their hearts and spirits and their not having been employed in their proper capacities, then go and ask at the hospitals, prisons, bars and graveyards.

There, you will certainly hear laments and weeping cries, and the wails of sorrow and regret at the terrible blows of their being beaten, for the most part a punishment for their having misused their youth, and for their transgressions, and for illicit pleasures. All of the heavenly scriptures and decrees, foremost amongst them the Qur’ān in its numerous, conclusive verses, report and give the glad tidings that youth, if spent upon the straight path, is a tremendously sweet and beautiful Divine blessing and a comely and powerful means of goodness which will result in the hereafter, a youth that is radiant and ever-abiding.

Since this is the state of affairs, and since the sphere of the permitted (ḥalāl) is sufficient for enjoyment [happiness and well-being], and since an hour’s pleasure within the sphere of the forbidden (ḥarām) gives rise to punishment in prison, sometimes for a year and sometimes for ten, there is no doubt that the sweet blessing of youth must most necessarily and essentially be spent in chastity and righteousness, in gratitude for it.