(Houda-K)..

You are standing alone in a large empty room; the walls are the
whitest you have ever seen. The silence is so strong its makes you feel nervous. You pace the room examining every corner, until you come across a door so white you can barely see its there. Suddenly you feel an urge to turn around, and as you do, to your surprise you see another door. You stand back and look at the doors one after the other.

Which one do you open, you think to yourself. Several minutes go by until you finally decide do open the first door. You slowly walk up and place your hand on the door, there is no handle, so you decide to push and as you do the door swings open to reveal a long pebbled road as far as the eye can see. The road is lined with large trees blooming with the freshest ripest fruit you have ever seen. They look so sweet that your mouth begins to water, on either side of the road there is a large meadow, in one meadow there is a stream with water so clean is that looks sweet, on the other side there are deer running around, eating, and lying in the warm afternoon sun.

You turn and look at the second door, so excited to see what is
behind it, you rush towards it and push it open with such force that it swings back and almost hits you. Behind this door you find another long road. This time there are no trees, no ripe fruit and no sparkling water. This road is muddy and bumpy. The very idea of walking down it makes you uncomfortable. The journey down this road would clearly be very difficult and tiring, if hunger or thirst strikes there will be no food or water and no place to sit and rest when you are tired. The other road however presents a very pleasant journey, one that you are eager to take. With this thought you commence your journey down the pleasant road. As you walk further down, your surroundings become more and more beautiful. You stop and sit a while to absorb the full beauty that surrounds you.

The time passes very quickly and you notice that it is starting to
get dark. You must get home before its gets too dark to see your way. You get up and continue walking. The further you walk the darker it gets, with each step you walk further and further in to a dark gloomy forest The beautiful tress that bore ripe fruit are now withered and bare. You suddenly come to a dead end, you begin to panic as the tress seem to be closing in on you. You turn to head back but when you turn around all you can see are thick withered tress that look almost demonic in the darkness.

The trees continue to close in on you until you are left with barely enough room to move. Breathing becomes difficult and you start to suffocate. You feel an urge to scream but the branches are now tight around your chest, you are not able to let out a single sound. You keep thinking to yourself that you should have taken the other road, the difficulty it would have presented is nothing compared to what you are experiencing at this moment.

Indeed had you taken the other road it would have lead you to a most beautiful place beyond comprehension, you would have certainly gained the fruits of the hardship, had you undergone that difficult journey. As the pain of the branches sticking in to your flesh becomes unbearable, you wake up in a cold sweat only to realise that you were having a bad dream.


The life of this world is indeed a journey for which there are two roads; one is a pleasant road, that presents an easy and most enjoyable journey, but leads to destruction. The name of this road is dunya. The second road will undoubtedly be a difficult one to travel, but at the end the reward is so great that words just cannot describe the joy and beauty of what you will find, this road is called deen.

Which road will you take?