225 – ʿAbd al-Rahmān ibn Ṣāliḥ narrated to me; he said: al-Muḥāribī narrated to us, from Sufyān, who said: We have been informed that Luqmān said to his son, “My dear child, this world is a deep ocean in which many people drown. Let your ship upon it be the fear of Allah, let its cargo be faith in Allah, and let its sail be reliance upon Allah—so that you might be saved, though I do not think you will be.”
Sulaymān ibn Yazīd al-ʿAdawī said:
The world’s delights forever prove treacherous,
And each dawn she labors with some grave affair.
A camp for wayfaring guests, a lodging for strangers—
Men plunge from her rims as she shakes them away.
Sulaymān ibn Yazīd al-ʿAdawī also said:
I see people as guests who have halted in exile;
Her days toss them about and are themselves tossed on.
In a beguiling abode they greedily feed,
Though they have beheld its passing and tested its loss.
Now she pleases, now she makes them taste
The sting of branding irons whose heat is aflame.
They curse a world whose udder they never let rest—
Never have I seen the like of this world, reviled even as it is milked. ⦗111⦘
Its milk entrances the prudent, yet beneath it
Lurks a fatal poison that kills when it’s drunk.
I have chosen the Noble One; no blessing in her milk!
Some awake in stern purpose while she wakes to her play.
All are bewildered: their deeds belie their words,
And the best word is that which acts do not deny.
One of the sages said: “O assembly of the children of this world, outwardly you carry the name of richness, yet the folk of frugality possess the same reality. You are denied the pleasure of what your hands contain because of crushing toil, and in its place you live with the fear that sudden disasters may strike it and the constant expectation that calamities will reach it. You have been deceived; the decrees of fate have turned away from your portion. The world refuses to let you savor the sweetness of what its udder has poured out for you until it assigns you to seek something else. It lets you enjoy what you have only briefly, then bars you from relishing it by preoccupying you with fresh pursuits for which you exhaust yourselves—pursuits whose attainment grows ever harder. You stake even your mounts on them; and if you reach them they merely join what was already stored away, while the world immediately rouses in you yet another desire. Such is your state with her as long as you keep her company out of longing for her.”