The Meaning of Life and Death
from
"Living Islam – East & West"
(Excerpts Only)

By: Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

Truly we ask Allah's forgiveness for not knowing His way, for not knowing the Imam of the day, for not following clearly and totally in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad. Allah is al-Ghafur wa al-Rahim (the All-Forgiving and Merciful) provided we truly stop our wrong actions. If we truly recognize how wrong we have been, then everything will be right. The reason we are suffering in this world is not because Allah wants us to suffer -- Allah's creation is based on love. If we experience trouble and disagreement it is because we do not know the proper behavior. I have come here to assert that the proper behavior is the Muhammadi way. Having access to the Prophet Muhammad makes it easier for us to behave in a manner that will bring us success. And, along with what the Prophet has brought, we have the advantage of our knowledge of the Commander of the Faithful 'Ali, which in turn gives us access to all of the Imams after him.

This life is a preparation for the next: we have been brought here from the non-time to prepare ourselves spiritually for the Hereafter, which is also in the non-time.

This life is in the grip of Allah, but appears to be interfered with by man. Allah has given us limited freedom to see if we, like children at play, will make a mess of this world. But, in fact, he is in total control and he will not allow this world to fall into the hands of the violent. This world will end up in the hands of the people of light and the Muslims. Not the Muslims whom we commonly refer to, but the Muslims who have actually submitted, awakened and are living every second. If one lives every second to its fullness, one is already on the edge of non-time, tasting the meaning of infinity, smelling the Garden. One of the names of the Garden is Khuld (endless time) derived from the word khalid (everlasting, permanent). Its verbal root is khalada and yields two meanings. The first one is 'to take refuge', 'to settle in', such as settling in a house. The second meaning is 'to last forever', Allah is al-Khalid, 'The Everlasting'.

All of us are lovers of Allah, whether we know it or not. We love His attributes. We love His names, al-Khalid (the Everlasting), al-Baqi (the Permanent), al-Samad (He on Whom All Depend). Because we do not want to be dependent on anybody, we pervertedly bite the hand that feeds us. We yearn to feel secure and independent. But we are all dependent on food, water, air, and ultimately upon Allah at every moment.

We find confirmation of our dependence upon the perfect Creator when we examine the human body. Our blood goes through vessels whose total length adds up to about 1600 to 1800 miles. There are millions of chemical reactions taking place within us. How do they work? How do our eyes, and our nervous system function? How is it possible for us to coordinate our hands. Is not our body incredible? Yet we take it for granted. We are in ghaflah, which means distraction, and it occurs when something makes us look in the wrong direction. Because we are not aware, Shaytan (Satan) is allowed to enter our life transaction. One of the words for awareness in Arabic is dhikr which also means remembrance. So unawareness is a failure to remember. But what are we to remember? The Qur`an gives us the answer -- it tells us we have to remember and why we have to remember. Allah says in Qur`an:

Now surely by Allah's remembrance are the hearts set at rest. (13:28)

Certainly it is by remembrance, by recalling, by calling upon Allah that the hearts will find calm.

Now what is the remembrance of Allah? Our Prophet says in a hadith (one of his sayings) that we are not to talk about Allah, rather we are to discuss His attributes. How can we discuss His essence? But we can talk about His attributes, His actions, and His creation.

Surely We have shown him the way: he may be thankful or unthankful. (76:3)

If man is grateful towards what Allah has shown him, he increases. If he rejects the truth, he is diminished and is doomed. Even if it is a whole nation that is ungrateful and thereby rejects the truth, Allah says He will recycle them:

Surely this is easy for Allah. (35: 11)

And the Qur`an says that Allah will bring together a people who love Him and whom He loves. Allah promises that His light will spread throughout His creation.

What is this light that is spoken of by Allah? It is not the sun nor any physical manifestation. The light of Allah is the knowledge of Allah, contained within His laws. These laws manifest on many levels, the grossest being on the physical. Within the physical world the laws of gravity are not going to change. Thank God for that. Allah says in the Qur`an:

Such has been the course of Allah that has indeed run before, and you shall not find a change in Allah's course. (48:23)

Allah is not going to change His course, his sunnah, simply because we have been nice people. We will be recycled like all of the rest of mankind if we are among the messy. So it is up to us to purify ourselves and place ourselves within the company of the right people with the right intention. Allah is not going to reprieve you simply because you have prayed five times a day and then performed your fast.

If you have true Faith, then you trust Allah. And even if you are collapsing, you are still content, saying ' "al-hamdu lillah (Glory be to Allah), I am in Allah's hand and He is my master.' You are not afraid of anything. If you have iman (belief, faith, trust) and 'aql (the faculty of reasoning) you are able to distinguish between people. You know when the people you are with are cheating each other. You perceive that there is no harmony, no unity. There is no good leader for them to follow. They are in a mess and if you are with them, you are in a mess. This is the situation unless one of us emerges to live as though at any time Imam 'Ali will walk in and will ask us: 'Why are you not sincere to each other?'

Imam 'Ali himself said, when asked why he did not claim his right to the caliphate: "Give me forty men." The meaning of his answer is that at the time there were not forty men who would follow him. We have to realize the situation as it is, otherwise, we will constantly be disappointed. But this does not mean that we should give up in despair. No, Allah says in the Qur`an:

I will not take from you a sign unless I replace it with a better one. (8:70)

This means, among other things, that our time now is better. It is not better in the outward sense, for outwardly it is worse. We find every year is outwardly more difficult, more complicated, more cumbersome than the year before. But if one is a believer and one's intellect is growing with one's faith, every year one acquires more wisdom, more understanding, more compassion. So, although outwardly we may be worse off with each passing year -- we are getting older and our teeth are falling out -- inwardly we are improving as we draw closer to the end of this short journey, if we have prepared ourselves by truly following Imam 'Ali, who said: "O world! I have divorced you." He meant: 'I am not going to fall into distraction. The world is not going to dazzle me.' The Imam uses the example of a woman because a woman's job is to attract man in order to maintain the continuity of this creation. Her nature is to attract man in order for her to procreate and to stabilize the family because man is, in a sense, unstable. So when he says that he has divorced the world, he does not mean that he has kicked it aside, for he relies on this world for sustenance. He means that he is on earth not being choked by the dunya, by the material world and its concerns. Among the related meanings spinning off from dana, which is the root word of dunya, are 'near and close'. So we see that dunya, this world, is close and therefore easily tricks us. This world is attractive to us because it catches our attention before anything else.

Distinguishing between the dunya (the material world) and the ardh (the earth) we see that the ardh belongs to Allah, is His garden and is neutral, whereas the dunya is what we make of this world. If we are attached to it then it is dunya. Imam 'Ali defines zuhd as being free of material oppression. The zahid, the one who practices zuhd, is pious, implying a certain measure of independence from the world and its attraction. When he says: 'Doing without does not mean that you do not own anything, but means that nothing owns you.' A very subtle distinction is made. One may have material means, but to be defined as free of them one must put them to their proper use. We may enjoy the things of this world as we make our way toward the Hereafter, aware that this world is full of tricks and pitfalls. So we do not renounce the world, rather we renounce the dunya: we renounce our attachment to the world. There is nothing wrong with a fine house or a beautiful garden or a comfortable place. What is wrong is our becoming a slave to them, and not being able to move away from them. There is nothing wrong with a decent meal. What is wrong is my constant expectation of a two-course or three-course or four-course meal. This is where the trouble lies. And if we are not aware of what goes on in ourselves, no matter how many outwardly correct acts of the Shari'ah we perform, we will not be in tawhid because our interior will not be unified with our exterior. The lack of unification in our lives is causing us to suffer and the lack of unification in the so-called Muslim enclaves or countries is causing a whole people to suffer.

To reach tawhid we have a formula which is: begin by proclaiming tawhid outwardly. As the Qur`an says:

And your garments do purify. (74:4)

We begin by purifying our clothes until such time as our hearts are pure, are unattached. And then through a constant revolution, through a constant turning of the heart we reach tawhid. The word for heart itself is qalb, and its verbal root is qalaba which means 'to revolve, to turn'. The implication is that a true heart is not attached. Knowing this we next can see how this principle was exemplified by the Prophet. Whenever he was approached and told that a certain event had happened, he would accept it unconditionally. He would never look back, nor blame people for what they had done. He would be absolutely efficient, retaining all of his energies to move into the correct future. Such was the state of that perfect being. His heart at all times was available and a reflector of the truth. It reflected reality, Allah's reality. And likewise, this is the state of the man who has abandoned himself to Allah, which is the meaning of the word 'Muslim'. We say we are Muslims in the hope that it becomes real, outwardly and inwardly, without any differentiation between outer and inner.

I wanted to share with you an open secret which is Allah's secret. Where is it that He is not? Where is it that the heart of the believer does not find confirmation of Allah's permanent perfection?

I want to share with you an advantage that the followers of the Imams have. It is our fearlessness in the face of death. It is a current message now in newspapers and elsewhere that the lovers of the Imams are suicidal, that the Shi'ah people in south Lebanon are suicidal and of course terrorists. The media have labeled a hundred and fifty million people as terrorists. Now I want to share with you the meaning of their willingness to die from a spiritual point of view. I want to show you from the Qur`an that if we truly believe in the next life, we will be in constant remembrance of death and that this remembrance will not make us heavy-hearted, on the contrary, if we are true believers it will make us alive. Every second will be an infinity. Every breath will be beyond time. Then we will be in this life without belonging to it, knowing the meaning of the barzakh, the interspace of intermediary world. With the remembrance of death we look to where we are going. It is something that we have actually tasted already in the form of sleep. Sleep is a mini-death and we have a peculiar love and attraction to it. We are programmed to love death, if only we knew what it meant. I have collected for you a few hadiths (sayings of the Prophet) and a few ayats of the Qur`an to show you how important it is for the believer to remember death.

Islam has the science of abandonment and freedom, not the science of mucking about with the lower self. I was once giving a talk in Karachi about the magnificent heritage of remembering death which makes you instantly less selfish and more humble. During the talk a psychologist who was disturbed by what I was saying said, "Isn't it morbid talking about death? We want to cheer people up and make them happy." In Islam there is no psychology in the western sense because the self which it deals with, the headstrong self or the self that directs us to do evil (an-nafs al-ammara him'), is not an acceptable subject to focus upon.

There is inward happiness as well as outward happiness. At best, the people of dunya, those attached to the life of this world, will obtain a taste of other happiness. But we want eternal joy which is the result of abandoning ourselves to Allah on the path of Islam, by means of submission, faith, trust, belief and excellence. Why hide the fact that we are all dying? Every breath is taking us closer to it. The only correct statement every human being can make at any time is: I am closer to death. While at one moment you may be happy, the next moment you may be unhappy, and so on. Yet, the psychologist wants the Muslim to forget it. Forgetting death only serves to enrich the drug companies who issue drugs to stop people from being connected.

I want to share with you this incredible formula that the people of Allah have, which is the remembrance of death. In this way we will not only be prepared for death but prepared for what is beyond it. Our formula is to live in the knowledge that at any moment we may be called to account for our actions. I want to read first from the Qur`an on the subject of death.

Say: If the future abode with Allah is specially for you to the exclusion of (other) people, then invoke death if you are truthful. (2:94)

Allah says: If you truly talk about the next life and you are sincere about it, and you think it belongs to you, and you claim it is specially reserved for you to the exclusion of others, then if you are truthful, you would wish for death. Also Allah says:

And they will never invoke it on account of what their hands have sent before, and Allah knows the unjust. (2:95)

Those people who claim the next world over others will in fact never wish for death because of what their hands have done. The meaning of "what their hands have sent" is what our life is: what we are doing and what is important to us, what we give and take and what we discard. Also in Surah al-Jumu'ah we read the following:

Say: O you who are Jews, if you think that you are the favorites of Allah to the exclusion of other people, then invoke death if you are truthful. And they will never invoke it because of what their hands have sent before; and Allah is Cognizant of the unjust. (62:6-7)

The ayah specifically addresses the Jews. In Arabic the phrase al-ladhina hadu (those who are guided, the Jews) is connected with huda 'to be guided'. Ironically, Allah says in the next ayah that they can never wish for death because they (the Jews) are lovers of the dunya. The Prophet says: "The dunya is for the unbelievers a garden and for the believers a prison." The unbeliever only knows about beautiful little houses, so that is all he gets. The believer has recognized and has been exposed to the light of Allah and because of that he feels imprisoned in this world. At all times the believer is outwardly in jihad, struggling in the way of Allah; at all times he tries his best to share the incredible gift of the knowledge that we are returning to Him after we leave this world. He knows that we are watched even though we cannot see the Watcher. This is called maqam al-ihsan, the station of goodness.

So in the above ayah Allah is saying that those who call themselves Jews do not believe and will not relinquish their hold on this world. Now the point is that this ayah is not limited to any historical context. As it applies to the Jews, so it applies to us even though we may have been born in Islam. Allah says in the Qur`an:

But none feels secure from the plot of Allah except the people who shall perish. (7:99)

Never say: 'I am a believer' and feel content and safe. Where is the end of iman (faith)? "Al-imanu darajat" (faith is in degrees). What we may say is: 'Allah forgive us our faults, remind us of them and cause us to move in a positive direction.' In addition, we may be proud of our heritage of Islam and of our love of the Imams (the descendants of the Prophets) whom we intend to follow as though they were with us, as though anyone of them may visit us at any time.

Allah is challenging those who pretend, those who are hypocritical. He says: "If you truly mean what you say, then wish for death." Therefore the true believer views his short life as an experiment and as a test. At any moment he is ready to leave, ready to return his body back to where it belongs, which is to the soil and the worms and the scorpions.

And they ask you about the soul. Say: The soul is one of the commands of my Lord, and you are not given aught of knowledge but a little. (17:85)

They ask you the meaning of ruh. It is by command of Allah. "Kun fayakun" (Be and it is). So look! the ruh is free. If we do not unify these aspects, we will not taste the sweetness of faith. Until then we will not take to the practices of Islam. It is no use forcing our children to practice Islam if we ourselves have not transmitted its sweetness to them.

We hold on to that which is superficial, outward, and institutional without freeing the heart from the drudgery of its attachment to the dunya. It is no use denouncing the corruption of the people in Muslim countries. If they look at their own situation, they will see that their only joy is in grabbing money. If they could find joy in witnessing the incredible nature of the creation, and the fact that it, in a sense, hides the Creator, they would not go for the lesser joys which are available to them. Once the heart is open to the highest of joys, man cannot be bought, even if he were to be offered all the kingdoms in creation. The believer realizes the truth of Imam 'Ali's words: "He who performs good deeds is accountable for them and his evil actions will bring punishment upon him." All our actions are taken into account by the One who is the most efficient banker, Allah. Is our inward knowledge and outward action unified? If not, we cannot talk about Islam which is submission, giving in to the wahid al-ahad (the One and Only). There are over two and a half million Muslims from the Indian sub-continent living in England, yet very few of the native English have become Muslims. If the Muslims were truly unified with the meaning of what they call themselves, England would now be dominated by Islam. If the English were given the key to the inner garden, if they came to know the meaning of submission and faith and the joy of it, would they continue to poison themselves by frequenting the pubs? The fact that very few English men and women have become Muslims means that the so-called Muslims who live among them are Muslim in name only. Islam is about the knowledge of Allah. If Islam is not leading you to the gate of that knowledge, then you are following something else.

The test in this life is to be willing, joyfully, to face death because the believer has not only the knowledge but the truth of certainty -- al-haqq al-yaqin -- and that is his freedom. He sees himself as one placed in a cage training for his flight to freedom through death. Just as the young bird is prepared slowly for its eventual flight into the air, so he is prepared for death through his acquisition of discrimination, by the development of his capacity to reason, and by bearing witness that there is nothing in this life that is going to give him true joy. In this life we busy ourselves with a job, a house, a spouse. No matter how we try to manage and balance our entire situation, we fail but for brief moments -- until we learn the key to our real satisfaction. Through knowledge we learn to be content in every situation because we see how events occur. We see the laws of Allah. We may be outwardly afflicted, but inwardly we see perfect creational harmony and ecology. When we have attained this, then we are prepared for that incredible flight which takes place at the point of death.

In Arabic, in addition to the word mawt (death), the word wafah (death) is used. Wafa` has another meaning, 'loyalty', and occurs in the Qur`an in many instances with this meaning. For example, in Surah al-Zumar Allah says:

Allah takes the souls at the time of their death. (39:42)

Literally this may be paraphrased, 'Allah will cause the nafs to be in wafa` when it dies.' We are loyal to our Creator, whether we know it or not, because we are going to return to Him. Both the spirit and the body are loyal. The body is loyal to the earth because since it has escaped from it, its return is inevitable. The spirit's wafa` (loyalty) depends on its spiritual elevation: it is determined by whether or not it has risen to what it has been created for.

Allah says:

And Allah has created you, then He causes you to die, and many a one of you is reduced in old age to most abject state, so that after having knowledge he does not know anything; surely Allah is Knowing, Powerful. (16:70)

All this is to test your loyalty, sincerity, honesty and faith.

Do they not consider how many a generation We have destroyed before them, whom We had established in the earth as We have not established you, and We sent the clouds pouring rain on them in abundance, and We made the rivers to flow beneath them, then we destroyed them on account of their faults and raised up after them another generation. (6:6)

Allah also says that he gives us, in this life, the experience of death. Sleep is that experience, it is a mini-death. Our longing for death is attested to by our love for sleep. The more tired we become, the more we yearn to taste our mini-death.

The mercy of the Compassionate One prepares us to take off in the next life, the akhirah. When we come to death, it will not be the "affliction...combined with affliction" (75:29) experienced by those who do not wish to die. On the contrary, when we meet death our experience will be like that of the real believers. How beautifully they die! Look at the death of the Master of All Believers, Imam 'Ali ibn Abi Talib. He said: "I have won, by the Lord of the Ka'bah!" But who was he referring to when he said 'I'? Was it the social security number or 'Ali the ex-husband of Fatimah? No, it was the voice of the ruh, the soul, with the cry of triumph. The soul was expressing its triumph at its loss of its body. Both the soul and the body were returning to their sources. It was easy and spontaneous. It is only when a man wishes to hold onto his body, not permitting his soul and body to separate, that death is hard. To facilitate this separation we use, before our death, a simple formula which is the remembrance of death.

Our master, the Prophet Muhammad, said, "Death is enough of a warning." The warner says, "Don't be angry. Don't be in haste." If you remember death while you are angry, you will be ashamed of yourself. Imagine cheating someone or being suspicious of someone and death comes to you. It is for this reason that we visit the great masters' graves. We do not worship them. The grave is nothing other than a hole. But when we go to the grave of a great being such as an Imam, we remember what he represents, how he lived, and how he died. We remember that he was an ayah, a sign of Allah on this earth, and we want to aspire towards that and follow in his footsteps. If we don't go there, we go somewhere else less important, which is less of a reminder. That is the reason the Prophet says: "Increase the remembrance of death for its remembrance obliterates one's mistakes and makes one renounce pleasure in worldly things." It helps to obliterate our mistakes as we have just discovered. Also he says it does not make you insecure about this world. You take what you can, you do your best. And you have no fear. Incidentally, if you have less fear and anxiety about the dunya it will be easier to accept it, because your efficiency will increase. Also the Prophet says: "Death is the believer's treasure." He says that because this world is the believer's prison, within which there is nothing but affliction and turmoil. Peace, in the true sense, is never obtained here. Salam is one of the names of Allah. We love peace, and thus, whether we like it or not, we love Allah. Even the kuffar (the rejecters of truth) love Allah. The vacations which they take are rituals undertaken out of love for Salam. Because they do not know that the key to salam is the heart, they travel and often, on their return, they more fully appreciate their home because of the miserable time that they had while on vacation.

Every man is a lover of Allah whether he knows it or not. The believer knows it and so is unified. The kafir (disbeliever) or the munafiq (hypocrite) or the mushrik (those who worship others with Allah) does not know it, therefore he is confused. If we truly have faith in Islam and act righteously, we are never confused.

And then also the Prophet said: "Remember more of that which destroyed pleasures, remember death." By remembering death we will not always be running after worldly pleasures. He also said: "If the cattle had the capacity to know what the son of Adam (man) knows about death, you would never have eaten one of them which was fat." All of them would be agile, ready and aware of the next life.

A man from the Ansar (those who supported the Prophet in Medina) came to the Prophet and asked him: "Who is the most generous and wisest of all men?" The Prophet answered: "Those people who remember death most, and those who are most ready for it." We are not suicidal, nor are we here to disturb anything. We are here to know the key which will give us inner peace. We are here to serve Allah in His creation and to be the slaves and the servant of his most perfect creation, the Prophet. Allah told the Messenger:

And We have not sent you but as a mercy to the worlds. (21:107)

We are not here to cause a disturbance, nor are we here to occupy ourselves with the life of this world. Our job is to be ready so that we are not scared when the day comes. Every one of us will be driving into death with a smile on our face. This, the unbeliever and the worshipper of many gods cannot understand. They are veiled from reality. Our master, Imam 'Ali, who is the door to the city of knowledge, said: "I advise you to remember death and reduce your forgetfulness of it." The key is the reality of La ilaha. Stop hanging on to what is temporal. Stop forgetting death. And he says: "How can you be forgetful about something that itself does not forget you?" He continued by saying: "How can you be courteous about something that will never give you respite?" The Prophet was asked: "Who is the most zahid of people?" In other words, who is the person who is the least attached to this world? He said: "He who does not forget the grave."

Lastly, I shall mention what the Prophet said concerning how one is to remember the next life. He said: "He who leaves the outer frivolity, the unimportant things of this dunya (who takes what he needs, for his strength, for his knowledge, for his heart), who prefers that which remains to that which will be destroyed and never counts tomorrow as one of his days (because it has not come) but counts himself as one of the people of the graves (i.e. dead)." 'Ali Zayn al-'Abidin, in one of his supplications, says: "Oh Allah make me not think that the next breath will follow this one and do not make me think that one leg will follow the other as I move it." This is dhikr (remembrance), which brings total awareness and beingness. This is our heritage, not arguments about this or that. If we do not move to that core, we will remain chasing our tails around in a circle, getting nowhere. The Prophet said that we should not count tomorrow as one of our days but rather we should consider ourselves as among the people of the graves.

Another hadith from the Prophet containing the same meaning is: "If you want to look at a dead person walking, look at me." But he was the most vital of all living beings. So what does this hadith mean? It means that his heart was dead to attachment, expectation, rancor, jealousy, and backbiting. It was a reflector of the Pure Reality that brought about all the other reflectors, among of whom we are representatives. Each reflector is only as good as the degree of its polishing. When we are tarnished by fears, anxieties, expectations and jealousies, we are unable to fully reflect the Reality. So we are lovers of the remembrance of death because we are lovers of the Creator of death who has also created life. For this reason we cry when a child is born, we foresee the trouble that it is going to have. We are happy when somebody dies; we say that now he knows the truth. This is our heritage, the knowledge and experience of which we are proud. The traditions are of no use if they are mentioned but not performed. It is like cooking a meal: if we do not know how to cook our own meal, we will do nothing but read and talk about the recipes and menus. But there is no use being angry about it. Let us do something. Let every one of us rise above being critical. There is no point in us saying all the time that it is their fault. What good is it doing us? We are being destroyed, not remade. We are not making ourselves ready for the next life. By blaming others, we are missing an incredible opening in this life and in the next.

What I have been describing is the true way. We want to be able to embrace it and know that it is our survival kit so that we can move on, unafraid of death, but afraid of transgressing Allah's laws. We are only afraid of ignorance. This is the true state of the Muslim.