Ahmadiyyat or The True Islam — Page 81
81 favours and bounties of God which they normally enjoy and should render them the more grateful to God. Man does not truly value that which he possesses, and he learns its true value only when he loses it. Most people never realize that eyesight is a great blessing of God, but when they lose it they realize its value. Similarly, when a man abstains from food and drink during a fast and suffers from hunger and thirst he begins to realize how many comforts God has bestowed upon him, and that he ought to employ a life so blessed in good and useful occupations and should not fritter it away in trivial pursuits. Again, God says, the object of fasting is that men should attain Taqw a. 44 The word Taqw a is used in the Holy Quran in three senses. It signifies security from pain and suffering, security from sin, and the attainment of a high spiritual level. Fasting promotes all these. At first sight it appears paradoxical to say that fasting saves a man from suffering, for fasting itself imposes a certain amount of suffering on man. But a little consideration would show that fasting teaches men lessons which secure their national welfare. The first lesson is that a rich man, who has never suffered hunger or privation and cannot realize the sufferings of his poorer brethren who have very often to go without food, begins through fasting to realize what hunger is and what the poor have to suffer. This produces in his mind active sympathy with the poor which finds vent in measures calculated to ameliorate the lot of the poor, the natural result of which 44 Al-Baqarah, 2:184.