Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | The Speaking Tree Weekly Blog | 23 Nov 2020
“It is not poverty that I fear for you,” Prophet Mohammad once addressed his followers. “What I fear for you is that you should have too much access to worldly wealth, as happened to communities that passed before you; and you become emulous of it, as was the case with them.” (Sahih Al Bukhari, Hadith No. 3158) This tradition of Prophet Muhammad, reported by Amr ibn Auf, has been propounded in both Bukhari and Muslim, the two main collections of traditions of the Prophet.
What the Prophet warned of, we have seen it happening in recent decades all over the Muslim world. The Muslims have had worldly wealth lavished upon them and with it, they have been put to a severe test. In far-off lands, they have palatial houses to live in, limousines to drive, inflated bank balances to draw on and credit-cards to keep them in luxury in any corner of the globe. All these things, and much else besides, have come with the accumulation of worldly wealth.
The trouble with great wealth is that it is all too often bought at the price of personal integrity. All too often it proves the great deceiver, tainting one’s vision and preventing one from seeing things as they truly are. What is before our eyes today, we come to think of as permanent; but it will be gone tomorrow.
For this reason, worldly wealth has no value in itself. Let us look at the matter in everyday terms. If one has a certificate of loyalty to America, for instance, it will not be of any use to one in Russia, because loyalty to the former indicates disloyalty to the latter. Similar is the case with this world and the next. Great expertise in worldly affairs will be of no avail when one stands before God in the next world.
Then it will only be realities which count. What a pity it is that man is lost in his own illusions, that he is allowing himself to go astray in what is, after all, only a transitory phase of his existence, quite unmindful of the fact that what awaits him is eternity.