to the most decrepit stage of life and becomes like a toddler. We see this in certain accidents: someone is injured, his brain is impaired, and he ends up like a small child. Or it may happen purely through old age—this is the second way—because once a person has matured and reached forty years, decline sets in. People differ: one may decline greatly, another only a little, but decline is inevitable. When something has reached its full stature and completion, it can only begin to diminish.

Thus, some people are returned to the lowest stage in both their physical and mental strength: the body weakens until he needs someone to carry him, help him perform ablution, and direct him, and his intellect may fail so that he rambles without knowing what he is saying. Being returned to the most decrepit age, then, covers both scenarios—whether caused by an accident or simply by the passage of years. When a person reaches this state—we ask Allah to preserve us and you from it—even his own family, the ones most compassionate toward him, grow tired of him. They become burdened and bored, and may even leave him in a facility for the government to look after. No one would be content with that or wish for himself to reach such a condition. At this point the obligations of prayer, fasting, and other duties are lifted, for he has entered a stage where legal responsibility no longer applies.

Next comes the plea: “I seek refuge in You from the trial of this world.” How immense is the trial of this world, and how many have been ensnared by it—especially in our own time. Our era is an age of temptation, just as the Prophet ﷺ said: “By Allah, it is not poverty that I fear for you; rather, I fear that the world will be opened up for you as it was opened for those before you, so you will compete for it as they competed, and it will destroy you as it destroyed them.” This is precisely