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THE WORD OF GOD
                                 From The Scriptures

         The Quran is the book of God. It has been preserved in its entirety since
         its revelation to the Prophet of Islam between 610 and 632 CE. It is a book
         that  brings  glad  tidings  to  mankind,  along  with  divine  admonition,  and
         stresses the importance of man’s discovery of the Truth on a spiritual and
         intellectual level.


           Translated from Arabic and commentary by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan


         The Rocky Tract
         In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

         Alif Lam Ra.
         These  are  the  verses  of  a  clear  Book,  the  Quran.  A  time  will  surely
         come when those who are bent on denying the truth will wish that
         they had surrendered themselves to God, so leave them to eat and
         enjoy themselves and let them be beguiled by vain hopes; for soon
         they  will  realize  [the  truth].  We  have  never  destroyed  a  township
         without a definite decree having been issued; no people can forestall
         their doom, nor can they delay it. (15: 1-5)
         The  freedom  enjoyed  by  man  will  last  only  for  the  duration  of  the
         period of testing. This is a very critical issue. If a man seriously thinks
         this problem over, he will feel that the period which is going to end
         tomorrow has, as it were, ended today itself. This thought will shake
         him terribly. But man lives his life in ‘today’. He does not pay attention to
         ‘tomorrow’. Reality lies exposed before him, but he remains engrossed
         in wishful thinking. He seeks out some imaginary supports of his own
         devising and thinks that they will help him on the Day of Judgement.
         But such wishful thinking will not come to his rescue when the period
         of testing is over and God’s angels come to take him away from the
         world of trial to the world of retribution.
         At a time like this, he starts remembering the occasions when he had
         tried to reject a genuine argument by mouthing false words; when he
         had  ignored  the  voice  of  his  conscience  and  followed  the  desires  of
         the  self;  when  purely  out  of  self-interest  he  had  ignored  the  divine
         preacher of truth, in spite of seeing glimpses of God in him. When he



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