Also, do not say, “I am like everyone else.” For everyone befriends you only as far as the grave, and the consolation of being together with everyone else in disaster has no meaning beyond the grave. And do not suppose yourself to be free and independent. For if you look at this guesthouse of the world with the eye of wisdom, you will see that nothing at all is without order and without purpose. How can you remain outside the order and be without purpose? Such events in the world as earthquakes are not the playthings of chance. For example, you see that the extremely orderly, finely embroidered shirts, one over the other and one within the other, which are clothed on the earth from the species of animals and plants, are adorned and decked out from top to bottom with purposes and instances of wisdom, and you know that the earth revolves and is turned like an ecstatic Mevlevi in perfect order within most exalted aims. How is it then, as an atheist published, they suppose to be without purpose and the result of chance such death-tainted events of the earth as the earthquake? [^1] It resembled the earth’s shaking off itself the weight of certain forms of humankind’s heedlessness of which it disapproves, and especially that of the believers? How is it that they show the grievous losses of the stricken to be without recompense and to have gone for nothing, so casting them into a fearsome despair? They are both making a great error and perpetrating a great wrong. Indeed, such events occur at the command of One All-Wise and All-Compassionate, so as to transform the transient property of the believers into the equivalent of alms, and make it permanent. And they are atonement for their sins arising from ingratitude for bounties. Just as a day will come when this subjugated earth will see the works of man, which are the adornment of its face, to be tainted by the attributing of partners to God and not to be the cause of thanks, and it will find them ugly. At the Creator’s command, it will wipe them off its entire face and cleanse it. At God’s command, it will pour those who attribute partners to God into Hell, and say to those who offer thanks, “Come and enter Paradise!”

[^1]:This was written in connection with the İzmir earthquake.

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