Question: How does one's love for Prophets and saints become fruitless?

Answer: Love for Prophets and saints, such as that found among Christians who believe in the Trinity, and the Rafidites (a Shi'a sect) who cherish enmity toward almost all Companions due to their love of  'Ali, is fruitless. [Such love is rooted in love for the person loved. As it is not in God's name, it leads to unforgivable excesses in belief. Due to such excesses, Christians deified Jesus and the Rafidites broke from the majority Muslim community.] Any love in God's name and in the Qur'anic manner yields good results in both this world and the Hereafter. I briefly mention its worldly results below:

• Loving delicious foods and fruits in God's name makes them a favor and grace unmixed with pain, an ease that yields pure thankfulness.

• Loving your carnal self leads you to pity so that you will educate it and prevent it from harmful desires and fancies. When you do this successfully, your carnal self cannot take you wherever it wishes and enslave you to its desires. On the contrary, you will mount it and guide it to truth, not drive it to passions.

• Loving your wife is based on her good conduct and her being a mine of compassion and a gift of Divine Mercy. In return, she will love and respect you. As you both age, this mutual love and respect will grow and increase your happiness. Carnal love based on physical beauty is fleeting. When it disappears, so do your mutual good relations.

• Loving your parents for Almighty God's sake is an act of worship and increases as they age. With a most elevated feeling and endeavor, you pray for them to live long so that you may get more rewards because of them and receive a pure spiritual pleasure by respecting them. If you find their existence unbearable when they need you and thus desire their deaths, you have descended to barbarism and will suffer a painful spiritual ailment.

• Loving your children because they are Almighty God's lovable gifts that He allows you to raise in an agreeable way is a love that brings happiness and blessing. You will not suffer much because of the calamities striking them or wail in despair if they die. Since their Creator is the All‑Wise and All‑Compassionate, you will conclude: "Since it was better for them to die than to live, Almighty God took them away from me." Thinking that your patience will draw God's Mercy and that He will bring [both of] you together in an Abode of Eternal Happiness, you will be saved from the pains of separation.

• Loving your friends for God's sake means that separation or death will not break the relationship you currently enjoy. You will benefit from this mutual love and spiritual connection. The pleasure of re‑union for His sake is lasting. While a second of union for His sake gives the pleasure of a year of union, a year of being together for worldly purposes means a second of union and ends in painful separation.

• Loving virtuous people like the Prophets and saints shows you the Intermediate World of the grave, which appears to the heedless as a dark, frightening solitude, as a mansion illuminated by the existence of those blessed ones. You will not be afraid to go to that world. Rather, you will feel an inclination and eagerness to go there, and the pleasure you receive from your life will not be spoiled. But if you love them as the "civilized" people love famous individuals, you will be grieved at their death, and the thought of their decay and oblivion in the past's "vast grave" will increase your pain. Thinking that you will enter the grave, which causes even the best people to rot away, you will utter sighs of grief and fear death. But if you love in Almighty God's name, you will see the grave as a place of perfect rest after discarding the body, and you will look forward to it in warm anticipation.

• Loving beautiful things in their Maker's name and in a way reminding you of their Creator is a pleasant reflection and will turn your view, which adores beauty, toward the sources of a far more elevated, sacred, and subtler beauty. You will turn from those beautiful works toward the beauty of Divine acts, then to the beauty of Divine Names, and then to the beauty of Divine Attributes and the Majestic One's matchless beauty. This love is pure pleasure, an act of worship, and a reflection.

• Loving youth because it is a fine blessing of Almighty God, you will spend it in worship and not waste it in dissipation. When you do that, the worship done while you are young yields permanent fruits. Youth disappears, but those fruits remain and protect you from the evil consequences of a youth spent in rebellion and dissipation. When you grow old, you will concentrate even more on worshipping God and deserve more from Divine Mercy. Unlike the heedless, you will not weep or regret your 5 or 10 years of youthful pleasures as you enter the twilight of your life. You will not be like the heedless, who say: "If only my youth would return, I would tell it what old age has made happen to me."

• Loving such exhibits as spring because they are works of Divine art means that the pleasure of observing them does not disappear when they are removed, for you can recall the meanings they have left in your mind like gilded letters. Like movie scenes, your imagination and time enable you to take pleasure in seeing them, and your mind refreshes the beauties and meanings of the past spring. In such a case, your love continues to give pleasure and enjoyment and does not become painful and temporary.

• Loving this world in Almighty God's name makes all of its creatures like amiable friends. Seeing it as a tillage for the Hereafter, you find in everything a capital that can be used for the good of your afterlife. Calamity does not scare you, and the transience of your life does not trouble you. You will stay in that guest‑house peacefully until your appointed hour. But if you love the world as the heedless do, you will suffocate in a troublesome, calamitous, transient, and fruitless love.

If, after indicating the pleasures and benefits that the kind of love taught in the Qur'an will give here, you want to hear and know such love's otherworldly results, read the introduction and nine indications that follow:

Introduction: Through His Majestic Divinity, gracious Mercy, tremendous Lordship, generous Caring, vast Power, and subtle Wisdom, Almighty God has equipped the insignificant‑sized human body with so many senses and feelings, such a variety of organs and members and systems, and numerous faculties so that He may make each one of us sense and know the innumerable varieties of His bounties, kinds of His favors, and instances of His Mercy. Also, He has done this so that we can measure and love His Names' countless manifestations. Each bodily member, system, and faculty has different types of service and worship as well as different sorts of pleasures, pains, duties, and rewards.

For example, eyes see the beauties of forms and various miracles of Divine Power in the sphere of sight. Their duty is thoughtful and contemplative observation and gratitude to the Maker. Ears perceive different sounds, creation's sweet melodies, and the subtleties of Divine Mercy in the sphere of hearing. They have their own unique type of worship, pleasure, and reward. The sense of smell is aware of Mercy's subtleties in the sphere of smelling, and also has its own unique pleasure, duty of gratitude, and reward. Like the others, the sense of taste performs many duties of thanksgiving by being aware of the tastes of everything consumed.

In short, all of our senses, organs, and faculties (e.g., the heart, intellect, and spirit) have unique duties, pleasures, and pains. Almighty God, the Absolutely All‑Wise One, will reward all of them accordingly. Their reward is either stated explicitly or alluded to in the Qur'an, the truest word, the most perfect system, the Word of God, Who is Sovereign, Mighty, and All‑Knowing.

First indication:·Lawful love in gratitude for delicious foods and fruits yields paradisiacal foods and fruits in the Hereafter and arouses in us an appetite for them. Even saying: "All praise be to God" after you eat something will be returned to you as a fruit of Paradise. As suggested by the Qur'an and required by Divine Wisdom and Mercy, any pleasurable thanks given to Almighty God for His bounties and favors will be returned to you in Paradise as the most delicious food.

Second indication: In return for loving your selfhood in a lawful manner (pitying it and working to perfect it), you will be given that which you love in Paradise. Since you gratified your selfhood's desires and ambitions and used its organs and faculties in the way Almighty God approves of while here, the Absolutely Munificent One will reward your (lawful) love of it by clothing you in 70 different celestial garments as samples of 70 different kinds of beauty and adornment of Paradise. These will please all of your senses. He also will adorn your body with 70 varieties of beauty and present the houris to you, each of whom is like an animate Paradise. Your love for youth in the world, which manifests itself in your using it to worship God, will result in eternal youth in the Abode of Eternal Happiness.

Third indication: In reward for the sincere love you feel for your wife due to her delightful compassion, laudable virtues and good conduct, and protecting her against disobedience to God and other sins, the Absolutely Compassionate One will make her an immortal friend for you in the Abode of Eternal Happiness. She will be more beautiful, better dressed and ornamented, and more charming than the houris. Spouses will be seated on thrones face to face and will take great pleasure in relating to each other their worldly lives they spent together.

Fourth indication: As the result of lawful love for parents and children, Almighty God, the All‑Merciful and All‑Compassionate, will allow them to come together in Paradise and reward them with eternal happy communion, even though the rank and place of each may be different. He will re‑create children who died before puberty as the lovable and most beautiful immortal children of Paradise (56:17), in a form worthy of Paradise, and return them to their parents' arms so that they may enjoy eternally the pleasure of parenthood. Since Paradise is not the place of reproduction, some thought that the pleasure of having children would be absent there. But as Paradise contains every pleasurable thing in its highest degree, the pleasure of having children, at its best, will be there by means of the children who died before reaching puberty. This is a good tiding for those parents whose prepubescent children have died.

Fifth indication: The Qur'an explicitly states that, as the result of loving righteous friends for God's sake, they will be seated on couches face to face in Paradise and will enjoy eternally the pure pleasure of talking to each other about their worldly lives in a most delightful manner.

Sixth indication: Your Qur'anic love for the Prophets and saints will cause you to benefit from their intercession in the Intermediate World of the grave and in the Plain of Supreme Gathering. You also will receive enlightenment from their elevated positions. According to the rule that "One will be with whom he or she loves,"each believer can have a part in the highest rank or position through closeness to the one with that position.

Seventh indication: Your love for beautiful things and spring, expressed in seeing them as the Creator's beautiful works, as well as in appreciating the beauty and harmony of the acts behind those works, the manifestations of the Names behind those acts, and the manifestations of the Attributes behind those beautiful Names, will cause you to behold, in the World of Permanence, the manifestations of those Names, which are far more beautiful than their counterparts in this world, and witness His Beauty and Attributes in those Names. Imam Rabbani says: "Paradise's beauties and subtleties are the embodiment of the Divine Names' manifestations." Reflect upon these words.

Eighth indication: Your reflective love for this world, on account of its being the Hereafter's tillage and the Divine Names' mirror, will be rewarded with an everlasting garden of Paradise as large as the world. Only the shadowy manifestations of the Names from behind numerous veils result in the world's amazing beauties. In Paradise, the Names will manifest themselves in a most splendid form. God will give Paradise, in relationship to which this world is like a small seedbed, to those who loved this world as the afterlife's tillage. Also, as required by Mercy and Wisdom and pointed to in the Prophetic Traditions and some Qur'anic verses, our senses and feelings, which are like small shoots here, will be perfected there; our potentials, which are like seeds here, will develop into varieties of perfection and pure pleasure there.

Since we loved the world only in its two aspects concerned with the Hereafter and the Divine Names and not in its contemptible aspect (the cause of all errors), and caused it to prosper through our worship as if we had spent our lives and body, senses, and faculties in worship, Mercy and Wisdom require that we receive a reward as great as the world. Since we loved the Hereafter's tillage for the sake of loving the Hereafter and loved the mirrors of Almighty God's Names for His sake, we will be rewarded with a world‑like object of love—a garden of Paradise as vast as the world.

Question: What is the use of such a vast and empty garden?

Answer: If you could travel throughout the world and most of the stars with the speed of imagination, you could assert that the world belonged to you. The fact that angels, other people, and animals share this space with you would not negate your assertion. The meaning of the Tradition, "Some people of Paradise will be given a Paradise that would take 500 years to traverse on foot," has been explained in The Twenty‑eighth Word and "The Treatise on Sincerity" in The Gleams.

Ninth indication: The result of your belief and love of God is the eternal life of Paradise and vision of Him. People of spiritual discovery and seekers of truth all agree that 1,000 years of a happy life in this world is not worth an hour of life in Paradise, and that 1,000 years of life in Paradise is not worth an hour's vision of the Majestic One in His absolute sacred Beauty and defect‑free Perfection. Seeing Him is established by the Qur'an and authentic Prophetic Traditions, one of which says: "That vision far excels all the other pleasures of Paradise, so much so that it causes them to be forgotten. After the vision of God, the people of Paradise will have increased in beauty and loveliness to such a degree that the couples will be able to recognize each other only with great difficulty."

All people feel in the depths of their being a great longing to see such great people of the past as Prophet Solomon, famous for his magnificent perfection, and Prophet Joseph, distinguished for his beauty. So compare how deeply desired and yearned for, and with what degree of passion, is our desire to see Him. And remember that one manifestation of His Beauty and Perfection contains all the beauty and perfection of Paradise, which are far more elevated than all the beauty and perfection seen in this world.

O God, provide us in this world with love of You and of what will draw us near to You, with the uprightness You command, and in the Hereafter with Your Mercy and the vision of You.

Glory be to You! We have no knowledge save what You have taught us. You are All‑Knowing, All‑Wise. O God, bestow blessings and peace upon him whom You raised as a mercy for all worlds, and upon his Family and Companions. Amin.

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Note: Do not regard as too lengthy the detailed explanation in this Word's last section. It is short in proportion to its importance and, in fact, requires further elaboration. Truth speaks in The Words·in the name of indications from the Qur'an. Truth speaks the truth. If you see anything incorrect, know that it originated from my mind.