People say that prison teaches you the value of time. We are nothing more than a combination of days, hours, minutes and seconds. When a day passes a part of us dies along with it never to return. Time is immortal. We can never kill time but it is time that devours us day after day after day.

People say that time is money. This is an illusion. Money can be replaced but lost time can never be replaced. Time is the most precious thing we possess. Ask the dead in the graves whether they would prefer time or money. They would probably give the whole earth full of gold in exchange for the chance to pray just one more salah. How deprived is the one who wasted years of his life waiting for a ‘tomorrow’ that never came?

The classical scholar Sufyan Ath-Thawri said

“Fear evil when you are in a good situation and expect good when you are in an evil situation.”

This is life. A wave of tidal currents that oscillates between the ebbs of hardship and the flows of ease. Allah tests us continuously, with good (to test our gratitude) and evil (to test our patience) until the day we meet Him.

When all the people you encounter in your daily life- friends, neighbours, etc. -are what one may describe as decent, honest, genuine people, your worldview is limited to that narrow mindset. You begin to think that everyone and everything in the world is good. You cannot imagine concepts such as ‘evil.’ That is why it is necessary to be subjected to physical, psychological, verbal and other abuses in order to form a balanced view of the world.

Having treaded both paths I have finally understood the hadith of the Prophet (SAW):

“People are like 100 camels out of which you can hardly find one suitable to ride.”

In other words less than one out of every 100 people is genuine: the rest are fakes. To varying degrees.

Eyes are the window to the soul. The art of recognising good and evil in a person by reading the eyes carries its weight in gold in life in general.Smiles, soft words, ‘sincere’ comments and crocodile tears cannot gloss over the evil that the eyes conceal. Learn to read the eyes and you will seize treachery before it seizes you. Fail to read the eyes and you will always be stung in life.

“Indeed Allah is with the patient ones.”