Modern Western art, particularly in the form of the novel, has become an instrument of self-exposure and, in most cases, what is exposed is inner sic… - Gai Eaton

We are all of us exposed to grief: the people we love die, as we shall ourselves in due course; expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who insist upon feeling guilty over the ill they have done or simply on account of the ugliness which they perceive in their own souls. A solution of a kind has been found to this problem in the form of sedatives and anti-depressant drugs, so that many human experiences which used to be accepted as an integral part of human life are now defined and dealt with as medical problems. The widow who grieves for a beloved husband becomes a 'case', as does the man saddened by the recollection of the napalm or high explosives he has dropped on civilian populations. One had thought that guilt was a way, however indirect, in which we might perceive the nature of reality and the laws which govern our human experience; but it is now an illness that can be cured.
Death however, remains incurable. Though we might be embarrassed by Victorian death-bed scenes or the practices of mourning among people less sophisticated than ourselves, the fact of death tells us so much about the realities of our condition that to ignore it or try to forget it is to be unaware of the most important thing we need to know about our situation as living creatures. Equally, to witness and participate in the dying of our fellow men and women is to learn what we are and, if we have any wisdom at all, to draw conclusions which must in their way affect our every thought and our every act.

What comes to us - or may come to us - is a gift from God which is adjusted to our receptivity, but is none the less out of all proportion to our deserts. Our principle task is to make ourselves ready. What is offered is clear and simple but, faced even with the possibility of this gift, we find ourselves to be a mass of contradictions, not merely unfit to receive it but incapable of taking it in.

The profane man's selfhood is a debris of memories and dreams, false hopes and lingering guilts, or hard little pebbles of self-concern, desire and fear. This is the 'hardened heart' of which the Quran speaks of so often. A vessel must be emptied before it can be refilled, and only someone who has expelled this debris from the centre of his being can hope that something of the divine plenitude may flow into him. There is not room in the human heart for two, as the mystics have said on a number of occasions.

Not only does the messenger who is also a slave subordinate his own will to that of his Lord; there is nothing in his mind or in his memory that could obstruct the free passage of the revelation. Muhammad is 'abd and rasul; he is also nabi al-ummi, the unlettered Prophet; a blank page set before the divine pen. On this page there is no mark made by any other pen, no trace of profane or indirect knowledge. A prophet does not borrow knowledge from the human store, nor is he a man who learns in the slow human way and then transmits his learning. His knowledge derives from a direct intervention of the Divine in the human order, a tajalli, or pouring out of the truth upon a being providentially disposed to receive it and strong enough to transmit it.