them are negligible. They cannot send those harms or benefits from the east or the Pacific Ocean. So it is indescribably crazy to disregard the dominicality and wisdom of the Most Pure and Holy One who is nearer to you than yourself and has disposal over your heart and who creates and controls your body, and to await harm or benefit from the very ends of the earth.

Moreover, curiosity and interest of this kind are extremely harmful with regard to belief and reality. For politics is the most extensive sphere and it causes heedlessness; it plunges people into this world and makes them forget the true human obligations and the next world. Particularly events like this that take the form of universal struggles, they suffocate the heart, too. One has to have belief as brilliant as the sun to be able to see the traces and works of divine determining and dominical power in everything, in every situation and every action, so that the heart should not be plunged into the darkness of tyranny and belief be extinguished, nor the reason deviate into nature and chance.

In fact, the people of reality try to forget the spheres of multiplicity in their search for truth and knowledge of God, lest their hearts are dissipated, and curiosity, enthusiasm, and pleasure, which should be directed towards necessary valuable things, are wasted on unnecessary transient things. It is due to this important reason that apart from some of the Prophet's (UWBP) Companions who served the principles of religion and had belief like the sun and the mujāhids and righteous people of early Islam who resembled them, for the most part politicians are not completely God-fearing and religious. People who are completely God-fearing and religious do not become involved in politics. That is to say, for people who make politics their primary aim, religion remains in second place and is as though subsidiary. The truly religious, however, consider humankind's worship of God and servitude to Him to be the highest aim of the cosmos, and regard politics not with passionate interest but in second or third place and if possible try to make it the tool of religion and the truth. Otherwise, politics resembles making everlasting diamonds the tool of common, frangible pieces of glass.

In Short: Just as drunkenness temporarily causes one to forget the pains and needs arising from true duties and yields inauspicious, fleeting pleasures; so too, following transitory struggles and conflicts inquisitively is a sort of drunkenness which produces an unpropitious pleasure since it temporarily makes one forget the needs arising from true duties and the pains arising from not performing them. It also causes one to fall into a perilous despair, which is opposed to the divine command of the verse "Despair not of the mercy of God" (Q 39:53), and so to deserve a slap. Similarly, one