The Third Issue

The Third Issue

Below is the encapsulation of an event containing a lesson that was explained in A Guide for Youth:

I was once sitting before a window in Eskişehir Prison (14) on the Republic Day. (15) The older girls in the secondary school opposite the prison were dancing in the schoolyard, laughing. Suddenly, via a spiritual cinema, I was shown the states of each of them, fifty years later. Of those fifty or sixty girls and students, I saw that forty or fifty of the fifty or sixty girls and students were turning into dust in the grave and being tortured therein. Ten of them had reached the age of seventy or eighty and had become ugly, arousing disgust in all those from whom they yearned for love [and affection], due to their having not guarded their chastity in their youth. I certainly witnessed all of this. I wept at their pitiful [and miserable] states that they were in. Certain of my friends in the prison heard my crying and came to me asking, [what was happening]? I told them: “Please go and leave me alone for the time being.”

Yes, what I saw was a reality and not an imagination. Just as winter lies at the end of this summer and autumn, so too behind the summer of youth and the autumn of old age lies the winter of the grave and the isthmus (barzakh). (16)

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14. Eskişehir (read as Esky-shaheer) is a city in the western region of Anatolia where Imām Nursī was imprisoned (1935 - 1936) in solitary confinement along with his disciples in the worst possible wardens with no facilities and food for days. Even under the most terrible circumstances he was writing his epistles. In this prison he wrote five significant epistles of his corpus within eleven months.

15. The Republic Day of Turkey (Turkish: Cumhuriyet Bayramı) is one of the public holidays in Turkey commemorating the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. After the fall of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire that ruled three continents, a new state, Turkey, was declared to be a republic. The holiday commemorates the events of 29th October, 1923 with various festivities including parades, torchlight processions, music and dances to mark the founding of the republic.

16. ‘Ālamu’l-barzakh (the isthmus world) is a transitional realm between the realms of this world and the hereafter. It is quite like a waiting hall for the souls of those who finished their worldly tests. The souls (arwāḥ) of the people who pass away, go there and wait until the Judgement Day or Resurrection Day. This realm is also called ‘ālamu’l-qabr (realm of grave). The Messenger of Allāh described the grave as follows: “The grave is either a garden from the gardens of paradise or a pit from the pits of hell.” (Tirmidhî)

‘Ālamu’l-barzakh is like a garden of paradise for a believer. The souls who migrated to that luminous realm with īmān (true faith) watch the gardens of paradise from there. For the people of kufr (unbelief), this place will be a pit of hell where the first samples of torture of hell are tasted. 

Were there to be a cinema that showed future events that are going to take place in fifty years - in the same way as past events from fifty years ago are currently shown by means of the cinema - and the states into which the people of misguidance (ahlu’ḍ-ḍalālah) and shamelessness will pass after fifty or sixty years were to be shown to them, they would weep in revulsion and pain at their illicit pleasures, and at those things at which they now laugh.

As I was preoccupied by this vision in Eskişehir Prison, a collective personality promoting shamelessness and misguidance suddenly stood before me, like a human devil. It said to me: ‘We indeed want to taste and let others taste every sort of life’s pleasures and enjoyments. [Now leave us be, and] do not interfere in our work.’

I responded to him, saying ‘Since you do not bring to mind [your own] death, and wilfully throw yourself into misguidance and shamelessness for the sake of your mere pleasure and enjoyment, know for sure that because of your misguidedness, the entirety of past time is dead and non-existent, and an appalling graveyard in which corpses have putrefied. The pains in your head and in your heart, if you still have one and it has not died, springing from that limitless separation and from the eternal death of those numberless loved ones, through the bond of humanness and due to misguidance, wipe out the present, partial drunkard-like pleasure of yours that lasts only a very short time. The future too, due to your unbelief, is a non-existent, black, dead and desolate place of terror. And those poor inbound [souls] who are coming from there, those who stretch their heads out into [the world of] existence, 

who pass through present time, have their heads cut off by the executioner of fate’s own hatchet and are thrown into nothingness. Thus are illimitable painful worries continually raining down upon your faithless head, due to your mind’s relation with [past and future] - and it destroys even your petty and dissolute enjoyment.

Yet, if you were to leave misguidance (ḍalālah) and shamelessness (safāhah) and enter, by means of critically verified faith (al-īmānu’t-taḥqīqī), into the sphere of steadfastness, by the light of true faith you would see that past time is not nonexistent, nor is it a graveyard decomposing and corrupting all things. It would rather be seen as an existent, luminous world that has been transformed into the future and a waiting room for the ever-lasting spirits’ entry into the palaces of bliss which exist in the future. For this reason, it does not bequeath pain, but instead allows one to taste, to an extent corresponding to the strength of one’s faith, the spiritual pleasures of paradise while still in this world.

Future time is not a place of terror and darkness. Rather, faith’s perspective sees that the banquet of the Merciful and Compassionate, the Possessor of Majesty and Bounty (Ar-Raḥmānu wa’r-Raḥīmu Dhu’l-Jalāli wa’l-ikrām) - the mercy and generosity of Whom are limitless - are stretched out in palaces of endless bliss. He Who has made every spring and every summer a table laden with blessings and opened therein exhibitions of His beneficence (iḥsān). Since through faith’s cinema he observes that men are driven there in droves, he is able to feel the partially similar pleasures of the ever-abiding world, to an extent corresponding to the degree of his faith. 

In other words, the true pleasure not mixed with pain lies in faith alone and it can only become actualised with faith.

We will now clarify, by means of an illustration pertaining to this theme that was written as a Footnote to A Guide for Youth, a single benefit and pleasure amongst the thousands of benefits and outcomes which are bestowed upon us by faith, even in this life. This as follows:

For example, whilst your sole child, whom you love so fervently, suffered in his death throes and you desperately contemplated painful, everlasting separation from him, a doctor suddenly appeared, like The Venerable Khiḍr or like Luqmān the Sage, and administered an antidote-like remedy to him. Your sweet and beautiful child opened his eyes and escaped death. Surely you will be able to perceive how much happiness and serenity this gives you!

Likewise, while millions of people - with whom you are closely associated and whom you love just like you love that child of yours - are, from your perspective, about to decompose and perish in the graveyard of the past, the reality of faith suddenly sends a light from the window of the heart - like Luqmān the Sage (Luqmānu’l-Ḥakīm) - to the graveyard that is imagined as a vast execution arena. By way of that [light], all of the dead from the first to the last are resurrected. With the languages of their states, they say “never did we die and never will we die and we will meet you again”. Through the bringing to life even in this world of the illimitable joy and serenity that touched you by means of these words of theirs, faith itself establishes the fact that faith is a seed. Were it to germinate, a personal paradise would spring out of it and become the Ṭūbā tree (17) of that seed.

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17. The Ṭūbā Tree is a tree growing in Paradise believed to have its roots in the heavens - according to a ḥadīth, it is so large that a rider could journey in its shade for a hundred years without leaving it. (See Ṣaḥīḥu’l-Bukhārī 4:474, Kitābu’r-Riqāq, Bābu Ṣifati’l-Jannati wa’n-Nār)

[After I had spoken to that obstinate fellow in this way,] he countered, saying ‘we will live a life of shamelessness and fun without thinking about these deep topics, so that we will be able at least to live our lives in joy and pleasure like animals do.’

I responded to him ‘You can never be like an animal, because for an animal, there is no past nor future. They do not feel pain or grieve about the past and nor does the [thought of the] future bring them worry or fear. They thus experience perfect pleasure; they live in comfort, sleep and thank their Creator. Even the animal held down to be slaughtered feels nothing. At the moment at which the knife cuts, it tries to discern some sensation, but even that feeling disappears and it becomes free of that pain.

Thus, the greatest mercy and compassion of Allāh is His not informing about the unseen and His veiling [the course of events that will happen to them]. This becomes most perfectly manifest especially in the case of innocent animals. Yet [take notice], O humankind! You are totally excluded from the animal repose that springs from the veiling of the unseen - for within the mind’s perspective, your past and future has, to some degree, emerged from the unseen. Thus, sorrows and the painful separations that stem from the past as well as fears and worries derived from the future take away your partial enjoyment and cause you to tumble down to a degree of pleasure one hundred times lower than that of the animals. Since this is the state of affairs, it is for you to either remove your intellect and cast it aside! Be an [untroubled] animal and free yourself, or return to your senses by means of faith, and listen to the Qur’ān! 

You will thereby obtain pure pleasure even in this transient world, a pleasure a hundred times more abundant than that of the animals.’ In saying all this, I silenced him.

Yet this recalcitrant fellow turned and said again, ‘well then, we can at least live our lives like non-Muslims and atheists do!’ In answer to this, I said, ‘you won’t be able to be like non-Muslims and atheists either. For even if they reject one of the Prophets, it may well be that they believe in the rest of them and if they do not recognise the Prophets, they may well believe in Allāh. Even if they do not believe in Allāh, it could be the case that they embody certain moral characteristics that could result in some virtues. Yet if a Muslim rejects and throws off the reins of the last, greatest Prophet, the Prophet of the end times (‘alayhisṣalātu wassalām), whose religion and mission are universal by that act he can no longer believe in any Prophet, nor accept [the existence of] Allāh.

This is because it was only by means of him (‘alayhisṣalātu wassalām) that one came in the first place to know of Allāh, of the Prophets and of moral perfections. Without him (‘alayhisṣalātu wassalām) these [realities] abide no longer in one’s heart. Because of this, from the days of antiquity people of all faiths have entered Islām - yet no Muslim ever becomes a real Jew, Zoroastrian or Christian. Rather the very same person would probably become someone with no faith, his otherwise moral virtues and characteristics are lost and corrupted. He would thereby enter into a harmful situation for the country and the nation. I have proved [all of this]. 

This obstinate and recalcitrant fellow was left with nothing to hang on to any longer. He [turned away and] disappeared from sight and went to Hell.

O classmates of mine in this Yūsufian School! Since this is the truth and since The Book of Light has established this reality as clearly as the sun’s clarity such that it is able to break the stubbornness of the recalcitrants, and has for twenty years entered them into the fold of true faith, it is incumbent upon us to also travel down the path of faith and righteousness that is the most fully beneficial, easy and safe path for our world, our future, our Hereafter, our country and our nation.

Rather than occupying ourselves with troublesome dreams [and imaginations], we must spend our free time reciting the sūras that we know from the Qur’ān and learning their meanings from the friends of ours that teach us. We must make up the obligatory prayers that we did not pray in their proper times and and benefit from the beautiful character traits of one another.

We must [then] transform this prison into a blessed garden that brings forth seedlings [i.e. students] with beautiful character. We must do all the like of these righteous acts in order that each of the governors and officials in the prison become upright teachers and compassionate guides employed in the work of readying men for paradise and in overseeing their training in the Yūsufian School - not torture officials like the zabāniya, (18) standing over criminals and murderers.

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18. The zabāniya are the guards of Hell, angels of punishment mentioned in the 18th verse of Sūratu’l-‘Alaq in the Qur’ān.