Are we prepared????

LESSON


Sooner, later we have to quit this world, writes Afshan Ghazi.



You are not special; you will die too. Have you ever been on the waiting list for an interview? You never know when you will get a call from the boss but still you have to keep all your stuff packed and be ready with all your documents in order. Same is the case with our life. We are all in the waiting list of death…and can get a call from almighty Allah at any point of time. So don’t you think we should keep ourselves ready for this painful moment?
Life is indeed very beautiful, if we just look at it. But all beautiful worldly things have to end up one day. When this life ends up, it brings extreme pain and suffering with it. But, how one would come to know what exactly happens at the time when a person dies. Nobody can return to this world and narrate the painful experience of his death. But for us the only genuine source which can tell us what happens after death is Qur’an and the sayings of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) Islam says man possesses eternal life and interprets death as transfer of one stage of life to another. Death is just the separation of the spirit from the body which ultimately introduces us to another stage of life, life that is eternal. Life, that purely depends upon the good and evil done in the stage prior to death. But the moment of death is extremely very painful. Even if all the pains, sufferings, torture, grief, sadness and problems of this life are combined together, they would still be less than the suffering at the time of death.
Hazrat Shadaad bin Aws (RA) on his deathbed said: “The moment of death is worse than the worst horrors of life. It is more painful than being cut alive with a saw, more horrible than being cut with scissors and more painful than the bones being boiled. If a man came back to life after experiencing death and told it to people, the sleep and comfort of people will vanish”. Allah says in Quran “Every soul shall taste death” (3?185)
Each soul has been given a fixed date and cannot stay here forever. It has to return to God. Depending on its deeds, it will either be awarded or punished. That means it will either go to heaven or to hell. But then, everybody wants to go to heaven yet nobody is ready to die? Nobody remembers that we have been created for subsistence not annihilation. We have to die one day, sooner or later, one after other, that’s something we all are aware of and we also know that death keeps no calendar .Still if we ask ourselves a question, are we ready to die? The answer will be a resounding NO in most of the cases .That’s something I can make out. But the question is why we are not ready to die? We say that life is not a bed of roses but a crown of thorns, then why we struggle to stick to this thorn bed as long as possible? May be we all are so busy in our lives that we do not get time to deem that we have to die one day. We are not permanent residents of this very planet. We have to shift from the multistoried mansions to a small dark room. From the companionship of hundreds to solitude, from comfort to torment, and from unaccountability to accountability.
Still we are not ready to die, why? After pondering about it, most of us may consider that they have not done enough good deeds to face the almighty Allah, or that we are afraid of losing our loved ones, or is it that we are so much lost in this materialistic life that we do not want to leave this materialistic world that seems known and comfortable. Few people think that they need to accomplish all goals of their life before they die. Dying without having accomplished all their goals in life would make their life seem insignificant and pointless. What kind of goals are they accomplishing? Perhaps I will never understand that… some people say that they are afraid of death because it is unknown but we as Muslims know everything that will happen to us after death. So why are we not ready? We gather for processions and stuff like that, how often we gather to thank almighty Allah for all he has bestowed upon us… why are we being so indifferent towards death?
I am not telling you to set everything aside and think of the fact that you have to die one day…I don’t want that. I just want to convey that remember death all the time and you will not do anything wrong in this life which will pay you in the life hereafter.
Death is sure, so let us prepare ourselves for it. Offer prayers regularly and realize we belong to each other, eradicate hatred from your hearts, have faith on the day of judgment, be a true believer and not a sycophant and be righteous and fair in all your decisions, give alms to poor and needy and do not show off.
In short, be the embodiment of Quran and the teachings of ‘Sunnah’. That way you will prosper here and hereafter.