Life of Ahmad — Page 347
as THE ESSENCE OF ISLAM 347 To become wholly for God as regards one’s belief means to regard oneself as a thing meant solely to know God, to obey Him, to love Him and to seek His pleasure. To become wholly for God as regards one’s actions means to practise, purely for God’s sake, real virtues which pertain to the various faculties of man and depend upon the powers bestowed upon man by God and to perform them with such zeal, sincerity and whole- heartedness as if one were seeing the face of God in the mirror of one’s obedience. The verse, continuing, says that one whose purity of belief and actions is based on such love and who performs virtuous deeds with such natural zeal becomes deserving of reward with God and that such people suffer neither fear nor grief, that is, they attain to salvation. For, when a man becomes wholly reconciled to God by believing in Him and His attributes, when his will becomes identified with the Will of God and his whole pleasure lies in obedience to Him, and when he does not perform righteous deeds by exertion but is impelled to them through love and takes pleasure and delight in their performance, that state is salvation. The salvation to be witnessed in the next life is nothing but an image of this inherent condition, which will assume palpable form in the life to come. In short, it is in this very world