their result, is divine pleasure; their benefits look to the hereafter. If worldly aims are intended in prayer and worship and they are performed for that purpose alone, such prayers are null and void. For example, the evening prayers are not performed so that the sun should not set and the khusūf prayers are not performed for the moon's reappearance. Similarly, if the prayers in question are offered for rain, it would be wrong. The sending of rain is Almighty God's business. We did our duty; we may not interfere in His concerns.

It is true that the coming of rain is the apparent result of the prayers for rain, but the actual, true and most beneficial result, and its finest and sweetest fruit is this, that from those circumstances everyone understands that it is not his father or his house or his shop that provides his livelihood and food, but a Being who has disposal over the clouds as though they were sponges and the face of the earth as though it were an arable field; it is He who gives him his sustenance and nurtures him. A small child even, while pleading with his mother when he is hungry, understands in his tiny mind from that prayer for rain that the One who administers this world as though it were a house feeds him together with all the other children and their mothers. If He does not provide it, no one else can. In which case, the child tells himself that they should beseech Him. He becomes a full believer. Six points will now be explained in connection with this:

First Point: The price for divine bounties and mercy is thanks. We have not offered thanks as we should have done. Not only have we not paid the price of divine mercy; we have attracted divine wrath with our sins and wrongdoing. At the present time, the human race has earned a dreadful blow with its wrongdoing, destruction, disbelief and rebellion, and it has received such blows. For sure we too will receive our share.

Second Point: It says in a Hadith: "Even the fishes at the bottom of the sea complain about sinners and the iniquitous; it is due to this that the rains cease and our livelihoods diminish even." Indeed, at the present time such sins and iniquities are perpetrated on the face of the earth that we are ashamed to seek divine mercy; innocent animals even are in torment.

Third Point: It says in a verse: "Beware the calamity which when it descends will not afflict only the wrongdoers; the innocent and oppressed will also be destroyed" (Q 8:25). For the wisdom in religion would be nullified if in the midst of a general calamity the innocent were to remain untouched by the conflagration. Religion is a test, an examination. Otherwise evil people like Abu Jahl would affirm it, the same as those like Abu Bakr the Veracious (May God be pleased with him). This is the reason innocents suffer in general disasters.