Likewise, “or affluence that drives him to tyranny”: Allah may enrich a person and open up the life of this world to him, whereupon he grows arrogant, imagining himself independent of his Lord. He then neither fulfills the obligations Allah has imposed nor shuns what Allah has forbidden. The Most High said, “No indeed! Man transgresses because he sees himself self-sufficient” (Q 96:6–7).

Next comes “or illness that ruins the body”: a sickness that wrecks a person’s life. As long as one enjoys good health, he remains energetic and cheerful, with the world spread open before him. But when illness strikes, the body weakens, the spirit contracts, and he lives in constant anxiety and grief—his whole life is spoiled.

Then there is “or senility that strips the mind,” meaning an old age that undermines and shatters a person’s faculties. Allah the Exalted says, “It is Allah who created you from weakness, then after weakness gave you strength, then after strength appointed weakness and gray hair. He creates what He wills, and He is the All-Knowing, the All-Powerful” (Q 30:54).

So long as someone is young and vigorous, he worships with energy—he performs ablution energetically, prays energetically, and attends lessons energetically. But once he grows old he becomes, as Allah quoted Zechariah, “My Lord, truly my bones have grown feeble and my head blazes with gray” (Q 19:4). The very bones—the framework of the body—grow weak, strength diminishes, and he can no longer do what he once did in his youth, just as the poet said:

Would that youth would return for but a single day,
so I could tell it what gray hairs have done.