The Seven Stages of a Life

So the dunyā is the worldly existence, and the dunyā also has seven stages.

The first stage is the infantile stage. It is interesting that the word in Arabic for the child is ghulām. The first stage of dunyā is ghulām, which means lusty — that is what it means, from ghulmah, to lust. And this is the infantile state: there is a lust, there is a desire. Ghulām goes to about fifteen years of age, from birth to fifteen years.

And then it moves into young adulthood, which is where hopefully the child has been humanised in that first fifteen years of life, to where they are safe to the society and a safety to themselves. The second is what is called shabāb, and it comes from a root word which means fire. So this is where you have the fire of life. The first would be spring, the second would be like summer: there is a fire, it is heat, it is intensity, there is a lot of energy to do things.

The third stage is reaching the kahl, which is related to maturity. It is related to productivity, where now the fire has been used usefully. So there is something cooked there: there has been something cooked, and it is something worthwhile now. There is benefit to be had.

And then you go into the fourth, which is adulthood — al-rajul or al-marʾah — which is full. And this begins at about thirty-five; forty is a very important year in the Islamic view, because it is when the human being is at their full maturity. The intellect is fully mature. The body has reached its full maturity. So youth is from about fifteen to thirty-five, and the first stage is one to fifteen.

From this point you go into the fifth, which you reach at about sixty, and you go into what is called the shaykh period, where the person is now like an elder: somebody who has wisdom, who has a type of presence within the society that is beneficial.

And then there is a stage here that is broken up, which would lead to seven, which is the ṣabī, the infant — the first five years, or the first seven years. But the last and final stage is called ʿajūz, and it is interesting that the male and the female are the same: there is no differentiation, the word ʿajūz applies to the male and the female. This is where they have entered into seventy-five or eighty years of age. There is a transcendence of gender at this point. In fact, in Islamic culture traditionally, at about sixty the woman begins to — there is open mixing, in many, many cultures traditionally, as the woman enters into that period of life. She is considered to have a wisdom, such that she should be present, she should be in that environment. And then ʿajūz is that last phase.