“Come and collect your ticket” with a truly profound pleasure and real spiritual delight. The pleasure is such that if it materialized and the seed became a tree, it would be like a private paradise. However, the person who abandons the delight and great pleasure due to the drives of youth, and chooses in a dissolute and licentious manner temporary illicit pleasures, which resemble poisonous honey polluted with those innumerable pains, falls to a degree a hundred times lower than an animal.

Furthermore, such a person will not be like unbelieving Europeans, for if they deny the Prophet Muhammad (UWBP), they may recognize the other prophets. And if they do not know God, they may possess some good qualities by which to attain to certain perfections. But a Muslim knows both the prophets, and his Sustainer, and all perfection by means of Muhammad the Arabian (UWBP). If one of them abandons the Prophet’s instruction and puts himself outside his fold, he will not recognize any other prophet, neither will he recognize God. Nor will he know any of the fundamentals within his spirit which will preserve his perfections. For, since Muhammad (UWBP) is the last and greatest of the prophets, and his religion and summons are for all humanity, and since he is superior to all with regard to his miracles and religion, and acts as teacher to all humankind in all matters concerning reality, and has proved this in a brilliant manner for fourteen centuries, and is the cause of pride for humankind, a Muslim who abandons Muhammad’s (UWBP) essential training and the principles of his religion will most certainly be unable to find any light, or achieve any perfection. He will be condemned to absolute decline.

You unfortunates who are addicted to the pleasures of this worldly life, and with anxiety at the future, struggle to secure it and your lives! If you want pleasure, delight, happiness, and ease in this world, make do with what is licit, for it is sufficient for your enjoyment. You will surely have understood from other parts of the Risale-i Nur that in every pleasure that is outside this and is illicit, lies a thousand pains. If the events of the future – for example, of fifty years hence – were to be shown in the cinema in the same way that they show at the present time the events of the past, those who indulge in vice would weep with horror and disgust at those things which now amuse them.

Anyone who wishes to be permanently, eternally happy in this world and the next should take as their guide the instruction of Muhammad (UWBP) within the bounds of belief. ∗ ∗ ∗