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fixed and determinate character of this time; what benefit to you, then, are
solitude and retirement, since the sickness has become general, the doctors
have fallen ill, and mankind has reached the verge of destruction?‟ I said to
myself, however: `When will you busy yourself in resolving these difficulties and
attacking these obscurities, seeing it is an age of slackness, in an era of futility?
Even if you were to summon men from their worthless ways to the truth, the
people of this age would be united in showing hostility against you. How will you
stand up to them? How will you live among them, seeing that such a project is
only to be executed with the aid of time and through a pious sovereign who is all-
powerful?‟

I believed that it was permissible for me in the sight of Allah to continue in
retirement on the ground of my inability to demonstrate the truth by argument.
But Allah Most High determined Himself to stir up the impulse of the sovereign of
the time, though not by any external means; the latter gave me strict orders to

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