18-19

Once, I was sitting by the window in Eskişehir Prison. The older girls of the high school opposite the prison were laughing and dancing in the schoolyard. I saw them as the houris of Jahannam in that Jannah of the world. Then, suddenly, their situation fifty years later appeared to me. Their laughter had turned into excruciating weeping. From this, the following haqiqah was uncovered. That is to say, with a ma’nawî and imaginary cinema, I have seen their situation fifty years later. I saw that fifty of those sixty laughing girls were suffering torments in their graves and had turned into earth, while ten of them, in their seventies, had become ugly and were drawing hateful looks from everyone. I wept for them.

The essence of the fitnah of âkhirzaman has become clear to me: the most terrifying and attractive aspect of that fitnah emerges from the shameless faces of women. Negating the will, they throw people into the fire of dissipation (safahat), like moths, and make them prefer a single minute of this worldly life to years of eternal life.

One day, while I was looking at the street, I saw and felt a powerful sample of that fitnah. I felt great pity for those young people I saw. I said, “These unfortunates cannot save themselves from the fire of this magnet-like attractive fitnah.” As I was thinking this, the ma’nawî collective personality of apostasy that ignites this fitnah and teaches it suddenly materialised before me. I said to it and to those mulhids who receive lessons from it:

O you wretched one who sacrifices his religion for the path of taking pleasure from the houris of Jahannam, who willingly plunges into dhalâlah full of dissipation, who accepts ilhad and irreligion for the path of pleasures of the desires of nafs, who worships life and is terrified of death, who refuses to remember the grave and is on the brink of apostasy!