yeh sorry about that bro chishti. tis one of the problems of being multilingual! we wouldnt want to turn you into a paki now would we?! for your benefit i will roughly translate the urdu couplet: Even if I get an earthly woman my youth would return! Who can wait until Judgement Day for the houris?
Forget the old english even though i'm old and...err..english, you brothers slip into urdu and i'm lost!! (only joking)
something funny i've noticed about the sunniport mods and i: we all have a penchant for slipping into olde english: 'hath' being our speciality it seems!
aqdas bhai doesn't this then beg the rhetorical question, as asked by aziz mian qawwal (and not a mean poet by any means), 'maTTi kii bhi mil jaayeN tau rawaa hai shabaab mein/Hashr tak hooroN ka intezaar kawn karey?' (something like that)!
jannah with all its contents will be like no one hath ever seen; all the mention of things you know on earth is to just drive home the meaning, the essence will be something else. palaces of pearls will be palaces of pearls like allah azza wa jall wants it to be, the material pearl need not be that what you find inside the shell of a clam or an oyster; but the similitude will be there and still every eye will say: this is something we have never seen, even those who dealt with pearls all their lives. for that matter the term palace is just there so that you know that it is something similar but unimaginably better than anything known. all that you see and mention are mere toys, like the ones kids have, what allah azza wa jall has promised the mumineen will be the reality.
the human mind wants that thing that will give it most pleasure. and in jannah, we will get whatever is most pleasureable. hence, it's no wonder there are similarities between the kuffar's choices in this world and what we will get [desire] in the hereafter because in being human, we are the same. same desires but in this world, bowing to these desires is a sin but in the hereafter, it's a reward!
I wasn't sure where to put this but I have spotted a pattern which I want to share. It seems that everything Muslims are promised in the Afterlife in Paradise, insha Allah (!), non-Muslims are achieving in this world as time progresses. It is said that in jannah people will all have hairless bodies and the fashionable trend now in Europe is to get your body completely waxed so as to be smooth--for both sexes; houris in paradise are described as being tall with blonde hair (Scandivanian girls?!) [i read that in a book sometime ago --by imam suyuti perhaps; it was somewhere in an arab muslim's phd thesis]; we will have wine freely; we will be able to have many sexual partners; everyone will be perpetually youthful etc. It seems that either the Islamic idea of Paradise is remarkably similar to the modern Western 'dream' or that they are doing a good job of living a heavenly lifesyle on Earth! Of course it may well be that everything they do is to imitate the Islamic paradise. any thoughts. Perhaps the hadith sharif, 'This world is a prison for the believer and paradise for the non-believer' is more literally true than we think!
