Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | Speaking Tree Website | February 20, 2017
The Prophet is reported to have said that on the Day of Judgment every person would be questioned about some issues, one of these being how he spent his youth. (Shuʿab al-Imanlil-Bayhaqi, hadith no. 1648).
Youth is a period when a person’s strength is fully alive and he is capable of doing whatever work he likes. This period lies between two periods of infirmity—childhood, on the one hand, and old age, on the other. The period of youth is really the period of action for a person, a period that is bounded, before it and after it, with infirmity. If you waste your youth, it is like wasting your whole life.
For any person, the period of youth is the period of the greatest blessing. It is because of this that in the Hereafter we will be specifically asked about how we spent our youth. The period of youth is the best period in a person’s life. What you can do in this period you cannot do either before or after it.
But there is a minus point with the period of youth. And that is, that it is a period before a person’s full maturity. In his youth, a person bubbles with energy, but in terms of experience and intellectual development he still remains in a relatively undeveloped phase. For this reason, most people make the biggest mistakes of their lives in this period. Hence, it is necessary to be particularly cautious when one is at this stage in life. A person in this stage must form his opinions based on deep thinking and his actions should follow deep reflection.