to associate partners with God, although a single evil, leads to such vast and numerous crimes that those who perpetrate it deserve infinite torment in Hell. Anyway... since this Second Fruit has been explained and proved repeatedly in The Illuminating Lamp, we have cut short the long story here.

A strange feeling and perception which drove me to this Second Fruit. It was like this:

One time when observing the season of spring, I saw that the successive caravans of beings, and especially living creatures and the small young ones at that, which followed on one after the other and in a flowing torrent displaying hundreds of thousands of samples of the resurrection of the dead and Great Gathering on the face of the earth, appeared only briefly then disappeared. The tableaux of death and transience amid that constant, awesome activity seemed to me excessively sad; I felt such pity it made me weep. The more I observed the deaths of those lovely small creatures, the more my heart ached. I cried at the pity of it and within me felt a deep spiritual turmoil. Life which met with such an end seemed to me to be torment worse than death.

The living beings of the plant and animal kingdoms, too, which were most beautiful and lovable and full of valuable art, opened their eyes for a moment onto the exhibition of the universe, then disappeared and were gone. I felt grievous pain the more I watched this. My heart wanted to weep and complain and cry out at fate. It asked the awesome questions: “Why do they come and then depart without stopping?” These apparently useless, purposeless little creatures were being despatched to non-existence before my very eyes, despite having been created, nurtured and raised with so much attention and art, in such valuable form. They were merely torn up like rags and thrown away into the obscurity of nothingness. The more I saw this the more my inner senses and faculties, which are captivated by beauty and perfection and enamoured of precious things, cried out: “Why does no one take pity on them? Isn’t it a shame? Where did they come from, the death and ephemerality in these bewildering upheavals and transformations which persistently attack these wretched beings?”

As I started to utter fearful objections about Divine Determining and the grievous circumstances of the outer face of life and its events, the light of the Qur’an, the mystery of belief, the