Malfuzat – Volume I — Page 191
Malfuzat - Volume I 191 which God Almighty created you is so that you may worship Him and become devoted to Him. The world must not be the centre of your aspirations. I reiterate this single point again and again because in my estimation, worship is the sole purpose for which man has been created and it is this very instruction of which man is negligent. I do not say that you should abandon your worldly businesses, or forsake your wife and children to retreat to a jungle or a mountain. Islam does not deem this to be permissible and Islam does not allow asceticism. Islam desires to make man active, diligent and able. Therefore, I say that you ought to engage in your businesses with toil and labour. It is narrated in a Hadith that a person who owns land but does not use it for agriculture, will be accountable in the sight of God. Therefore, if someone understands this instruction to mean that they should detach themselves from the affairs of the world, they are mistaken. Not at all. The fact of the matter is that you ought to ensure that the pleasure of God Almighty is intended in the business that you engage in, and you must not ignore His will to give precedence to your own motives and emotions. Therefore, if the objective of a person's life is to go on in a life of ease and com- fort, and if the pinnacle of their achievement is nothing more than eating, drink- ing, clothing and sleep, and no room for God Almighty remains in their heart, then remember that such a person turns away from the nature with which God has made them. As a result, such a one will gradually waste away their faculties. It is an obvious fact that when we acquire a thing for a certain purpose, if it does not fulfil that very purpose, we consider it to be useless. For example, if one obtains a piece of wood to make a chair or table, but it proves to be unusable, it will be used as firewood. Similarly, the actual purpose of man's creation is the worship of Allah, but if man alters their inherent disposition on account of external means and superficial relations, rendering it useless, then God Almighty does not care for such people. It is to this very fact which the following verse refers: 2 قُلْ مَا يَعْبَؤُا بِكُمْ رَبِّي لَوْلَا دُعَاؤُكُمْ Say to the disbelievers: But for your prayer to Him my Lord would not care for you. On a previous occasion, I mentioned that I saw a dream in which I was standing in a jungle. There was a ditch that ran from East to West and sheep were laid on Al-Hakam, vol. 5, no. 29, dated 10 August 1901, pp. 1-2 al-Furqan, 25:78