Job 21:26 Meaning They Lie Down Alike in the Dust

Dhikr al-mawt: Keeping death in mind Al-Ghazali gave the closing book of his Revival to this. The steady memory of dying quiets the comparing that goes on inside someone watching other people thrive while their own life comes apart. Next to one plain ending, the gap between the comfortable and the ruined shrinks to something much smaller than it looks day to day.

Be in the world as a stranger or a traveler passing through: nothing here is kept The Prophet said this, and Sufis have repeated it ever since. It meets the ache of watching another person's wealth pile up while your own life is stripped bare. Whatever either of them gathered stays behind, so the size of the pile never settled which life went better.

Everything perishes except His face: only God lasts The Quran puts it that way, and Sufis take it as the plain shape of things. Every advantage one person holds over another sits inside what wears away, which is why weighing the two against each other settles nothing. God alone stays, so someone in grief has one thing to hold that no outcome can cancel.

Ẓāhir and bāṭin: the outside and the inside Ibn Arabi keeps returning to this pair, the visible face of a thing and its hidden side. Two lives can finish in the same condition and have been nothing alike within. Endings that match on the surface show only that the surface was never where the difference lived, and no onlooker can grade the rest.

Sirr al-qadar: the secret of the decree Sufis call the workings of God's decree a secret, closed to us. That meets the exact complaint of a person who cannot see why the cruel finish comfortable and the decent finish broken. Calling the accounting hidden rather than missing lets someone keep their sense that it matters while admitting they cannot read it.