Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | The Sunday Guardian | December 8, 2013

The Prophet Muhammad said, "Simplicity is a part of faith." Absence of simplicity is the complex methods adopted in conducting our daily lives. Methods requiring greater resources, time and effort but satiating only our ordinary needs; methods that require the use of our intellectual faculties only for worldly pursuits, while they could have been rightly used for seeking knowledge, intellectual and personality development, spiritual growth and the promotion of global peace.

Man is the crown of creation by virtue of being endowed with the power of thinking. This blessing of God can be used either for the most mundane things or for the higher things of life.

It does not befit us to use this blessing for the sole achievement of our worldly material needs which in any case will be fulfilled with less effort. However, this is possible only when one makes a conscious endeavour to keep life simple.

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If we remain distracted by various trivial things of life, we will not be able to focus our minds on the higher realities of life. It will be equivalent to living as an animal and dying as an animal.

If we do not conspicuously live life in a simple way, things will get complicated and we will create a web of frivolous goals that lead us towards the chains of materialism.

Our focus will shift from a God-oriented life to a material existence. Prophet Muhammad has predicted that material wealth will be the cause of much evil amongst the people of the latter times.

The only way of saving ourselves from such evil will be to adopt simplicity in everything we do, which will result in high thinking in life. This is the essential ingredient in our endeavour to seek the truth and increase our faith