- Concerning Ibn ʿUmar’s words, “Take from your health for your illness, and from your life for your death,” Ibn Rajab commented, “That is, make the most of righteous deeds while you are healthy before sickness prevents you, and while you are alive before death intervenes.”
Al-Tirmidhi (2306) relates, on the authority of Abu Hurayrah, that the Prophet ﷺ said: “Hasten to perform deeds before seven (things) overtake you: Are you waiting for anything but poverty that makes you forget, wealth that leads you astray, disease that ruins you, debilitating old age, sudden death, the Antichrist—for he is the worst absentee whose arrival is awaited—or the Hour? For the Hour is more calamitous and more bitter!”
Verses on renunciation and wisdom:
Someone said:
“Prepare for the event that must arrive,
for death is the appointed time of every slave.
Will you consent to travel with a company
well-provisioned, while you carry none?”
Another poet said:
“Do you build as though you will live forever,
when, had you but understood, your stay is brief?
The shade of a single arak tree would suffice
for one whose departure is always drawing near.”
A third said:
“We journey toward our terms at every moment,
our days folding behind us, each one a stage.
I have never seen a truth like death:
if hopes leap over it, they are sheer illusion.
How ugly it is to squander the season of youth—
what then when grey hairs already blaze on the head!
Leave this world with provision of godfearing,
for your lifetime is but a handful of days.”
Ibn al-Qayyim said:
“Come, then, to the Gardens of Eden:
they are your first abode, there your camp is pitched.
Yet we are captives in the enemy’s grip—will we,
I wonder, return to our homeland and be safe?
They claim that when a stranger wanders far
and his home recedes, he pines in longing;
but what estrangement surpasses our exile,
wherein the foes have come to rule over us?”