Five Seconds to Go
Anything done only for God’s sake will help man in the Afterlife. Each step that man takes in this world leads him relentlessly towards either Paradise or Hell in the Hereafter.
Once when I was on a visit to Meerut I went for a stroll one evening with my host, Maulana Shakeel Ahmed Qasmi. We were walking along the Sadar Bazaar when, all of a sudden, the whole front of a house just a few yards ahead of us, collapsed without warning, blocking the entire width of the street with debris. We were hardly five seconds away from the scene of this tragic accident. Had we been five seconds earlier, or had the house caved in five seconds later, there is no way that we could have escaped. Our deaths would have been instantaneous. So, while we happily imagined that our final destination lay far ahead, our journey would have been cut short in the middle.
At that time, it occurred to me that man is separated from death by a mere five seconds. At any point in time, there is the chance that man will make this five-second journey—and find himself in another world.
If only man could quite finally grasp the enormity of the fact that the distance between him, at any given point in his life, and death, could be so infinitesimally short, he would undergo the most amazing metamorphosis; he would continue to live in this world, but his thoughts would then become firmly focused on the life to come. Man needs to realize that he is standing on death’s doorstep, immediately after death, in the words of the Prophet of Islam, he either would enter the garden of Paradise or plunge into the pit of Hellfire. (Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Hadith No. 2460). Each step that man takes in this world leads him relentlessly toward one of the two extremes. However, man has become so insensitive to this reality that he seldom sees fit to consider it seriously.
People trust false ideals and worship them as if they were holy, but only the humble reverence man has for God in this life can be of any avail in the next eternal world. True worship means fearing God so that He comes to entirely dominate man’s thoughts. He becomes the supreme force in his life and monitors all one’s affairs. Whatever is done then is for the sake of God, for the love of God, out of fear of God, and for no other. In short, a man’s genuine concern is for life in the world to come. Given such concern, life’s mundane affairs should pale into insignificance.
