those limited individuals and embark on the same corruption. As though the reality of their national identity is fined down, but not destroyed, and when the time arrives, it reemerges. In just the same way, those same tribes which overturned the world at one time will when the time comes again overturn human civilization with divine permission. But what impels them will be in a different form. None knows the Unseen save God.

Ninth Principle

NINTH PRINCIPLE: The results of some of the questions of belief look to this restricted, narrow world, while others look to the world of the hereafter, which is broad and absolute. In order to have the appropriate effect of either encouraging or restraining, some Hadiths about the merits and rewards of actions are in an eloquent style and some unthinking people have supposed them to be exaggerated. However, since they are all pure truth and reality, they contain no exaggeration or overstatement.

For instance, this Hadith has worried the heads of the unfair more than any. Its meaning is: “If the world had the value of a fly’s wing for Almighty God, the unbelievers would not have had so much as a mouthful of water from it.” [^6] The truth of it is this: the phrase “for Almighty God” refers to the eternal realm. Yes, since a light as small as a fly’s wing from the eternal realm is everlasting, it is greater than a temporary light that fills the face of the earth. It is not to say that the huge world is equal to a fly’s wing, but that everyone’s private world which is situated within their short lives, is not equal to even a tiny amount – a fly’s wing – of an everlasting divine effulgence and bounty from the eternal realm.

[^6]:See, Tirmidhī, Zuhd, 13; al-Ḥākim, al-Mustadrak, iv, 306; Abū Na’īm al-Isfahānī, Ḥilyat al-Awliyā’, iii, 253.

Furthermore, the world has two faces, indeed, three faces. One is the mirror to Almighty God’s names, another looks to the hereafter and is its arable field, and the third looks to transience and non-existence. This latter is the world of the people of misguidance which is not in accordance with the things that please God that we know. That is to say, the Hadith infers that the world of those who worship the world, which is opposed to the hereafter and is the source of all wrongs and the spring of calamities, is not worth a single everlasting particle that will be given to the believers in the hereafter, not the vast world which is the mirror to the most beautiful names, consists of missives of the Eternally Besought One, and is the tillage of the hereafter. Thus, how can the unfair atheists’ understanding be compared with this most true and serious truth? What has the exaggerated and overstated meaning they fancy to do with this?

And, for example, the unfair atheists have also supposed narrations