Page 40 - Faith: The Way to Happiness

FAITH: THE WAY TO HAPPINESS

intolerable difficulties for a person, it also makes him do things he
does not want to do. A person who, by contrast, accepts Allah as his
only God conforms only to His Word and tries to gain only His ap-
proval and love. In the Qur'an, Allah gives a very wise example of
the difference between these two types of person:
Allah has made a metaphor for them of a man owned by
several partners in dispute with one another and another
man wholly owned by a single man. Are they the same?
Praise be to Allah! The fact is that most of them do not
know. (Surat az-Zumar: 29)
Remember when he [Ibrahim] said to his father, "Father,
why do you worship what can neither hear nor see and is
not of any use to you at all?" (Surah Maryam: 42)
As Allah tells us in the verse, a person who accepts other gods
is compelled to live in psychological turmoil and will be unable to
obtain the best result for anything he does or receive the attention
and approval he expects. The reason for this is the desire of people
to seek their own advantage and put themselves in first place in
their relations with one another. People from whom a person ex-
pects help, whose every instruction he follows and whose goodwill
he tries to obtain do not or cannot give him anything he wants be-
cause of their own interests and advantages. They may even change
to the extent that when he visits them they become his enemies and
want to do him harm. This is another factor which intensifies the
trouble and lack of tranquility a person may feel. In order to protect
ourselves against setting up false gods we need to think deeply
about this behavior and direct ourselves towards Allah's appro v a l
in the knowledge that there is no power other than His.
Nothing and nobody a person adopts as a false god has any

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