If you claim that you are God’s favorites to the exclusion of other people...

If you claim that you are God’s favorites to the exclusion of other people, then long for death, should you be truthful. Yet they will never long for it because of what their hands have sent ahead, and God knows best the wrongdoers.” [^1] This is a litmus test to gauge the truthfulness of their claim. Lack of preparation for the hereafter results from getting wedded to the world, therefore, this is the principal factor that causes fear of death.

Something to this effect has been related from Imam al-Sadiq (as): “He who loves the world is humiliated”. [^2] This narration could be analyzed and interpreted in this way: love for the world and attachment to it is among the causes of uneasiness towards death, and the two are in fact two sides of a single issue; he who loves the world becomes afraid of death.

Whoever fears death is humiliated because he does not have the ability to take a stand on a bold resolution, and when a man is unable to do so he becomes a compliant tool whose actions are dependent on those of the arrogant powers: This is the humiliation which Imam al-Sadiq (as) speaks about in this narration. This is a precise yardstick by which a person’s readiness for the hereafter, in this world, may be known.

The more one’s attachment to the life of this world is, the less his preparation for the next; and the less one’s preparation for the hereafter is, the more his apprehension about death.

Someone said to Abu Dharr (may God be pleased with him): “Why do we dislike death?” He replied: “Because you have built this world and demolished your hereafter; so you dislike moving from a refurbished place to ruins.” Then he asked: “How do you consider our meeting God?” “The good doer will [meet Him] like someone who has been away and now returns to his family, the wrongdoer will [meet God] like the slave who had run away and now returns to his master.” The questioner added: “How do you see our condition with God?

” He replied: “Put your works before the Book of God, the Blessed, the Sublime [for He says]: "Indeed the pious shall be amid bliss, and indeed the vicious shall be in hell” [^3] then the man said: “So where is God’s mercy?” Abu Dharr answered: "Indeed God’s mercy is close to the virtuous.” [^4] , [^5] The Stand Strength, courage and audacity certainly constitute one of the two elements that make a stand, the other being political awareness.