Peak of Eloquence Nahjul Balagha By Imam Ali ibn Abu Talib - English Translation - Sermon 224

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Transience of the World, the Helplessness of Those Entombed

This [world] is a house surrounded by calamities and is well-known for deceitfulness. Its conditions do not last and those who inhabit it do not remain safe. Its conditions change and its ways alternate. Life in it is blameworthy and safety in it is non-existent. Yet its people are targets; it strikes them with its arrows and destroys them with death.

Be informed, O servants of Allah, that certainly you and all the things in this world in your possession are treading on the paths of those (who were) before you. They lived longer life-spans, had more populated houses and left behind more lasting tracks. Their voices have become silent, their movements have become stationary, their bodies have become rotten, their houses have become empty and their traces have become obliterated. Their magnificent places and spread-out carpets were changed into stones, laid-in -blocks and cave-like dug-out graves whose very foundation is based on ruins and whose construction has been made with soil. Their positions are contiguous, but those settled in them are like far-flung strangers. They are among the people of their area but feel lonely; they are free from having to work but are still engaged (in activity). They feel no attachment to homelands, nor do they keep contact with each

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other, as neighbors do, despite nearness of neighborhood. And how can they meet each other when decay has ground them with its chest and stones and earth have eaten them up?

It is as though you too have gone where they have gone, the same sleeping place has caught you, the same place has detained you. What would then be your status when your affairs reach their end and graves are turned upside down?

“Every soul shall realize what it has sent before, and they shall be brought back to Allah, their true Lord, and what they did fabricate (of false deities) would vanish from them” (Holy Quran, 10: 30).