"And unto Allah belongeth the Unseen of the heavens and the earth, and the matter of the Hour (of Doom) is but as a twinkling of the eye, or it is nearer still. Lo! Allah is Able to do all things."
Surah Al Nahl, 'The Bee', 16 : 77
....Creation, the Big Bang, before The Big Bang,Doomsday,Post Doomsday..all belong to Him...and in His reckoning, all these are just 'as a twinkling of the eye, or nearer still'.
Looking from our perspective,the end of time would seem very far and quite impersonal to all of us, whatever age or period and stage we are in, but at the individual level, 'Doomsday' is just a breath away. Our own demise , at the individual level, represent the end of the universe for us. A sobering thought. From then on it is, simply put, 'Man Rabbuka!?'...Who is your Lord?....Who is your leader?....What is your Din?. Then we go through an indefinite period of Alam Barzarkh. Finally tomorrow or a century or couple of thousand years time, for all humanity, the Bigger Doomsday, followed a couple of millenium further down the lane, The Siratul Mustakim and the final weighing of Al Mizan.
The clever Muslim, an old sufi sage used to say, is 'a child of the hour'. He always plant one of his feet firmly on this side of the divide and the other in 'the hereafter'......that is the Big Picture! In constant dzikr and remembrance of Allah.
The much quoted Prophetic advisory was to work as if you are going to last a 1000 years and 'pray' as if you are going to die tomorrow.
And to put things in perspective, Imam Al Ghazali, in not so many words, added that 'it is not the volume that matters, it is in constancy'.
"What is more catastrophic than to go through this life in a state of stupor, heedless drunkenness, distraction and comatosed! It is better to be unsuccessful, a nobody, than to be in such a state of unawareness, inward stress and a billionaire!"
Huwallahualam!
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