A Crop, and a Reminder of the Meeting

Allah (swt) then moves to the sixteenth; and here is the further reason for what has just been mentioned. After the prohibition of penetrative intercourse during menstruation, Allah (swt) says:

Your women are a tilth, a crop for you. Fa-ʾtū ḥarthakum annā shiʾtum: you may approach your crop from whichever direction you wish — which is in fact an answer to the Jewish prohibition, which allowed intercourse in one position only, holding the other to be wrong and to produce every kind of harm. The Qur'an says that it is entirely permitted. Wa-qaddimū li-anfusikum: send forth for yourselves.

And then, remarkably: wa-ttaqū Allāha wa-ʿlamū annakum mulāqūh — and fear Allah, and know that you shall meet Him one day. Know that you shall meet Him.

Why should that stand here, where intercourse is being spoken of? From it many of the ʿulamāʾ have drawn the following: that for those who are truly the awliyāʾ of Allah, who have truly come to know Him, all of this is a reminder of the pleasures of the hereafter and of the greatness of Allah. So that even when they are engaged in what people would call a lowly act — which it is not, for done rightly it is a noble act, being the means by which human beings are born — they draw nearer to Allah, by the very way in which they regard what they are doing. Hence Imam al-Ghazālī says that this affords one of the sensations of the greatest pleasure, to remind one of Paradise. Our understanding of these things needs changing. And this too must be left to the reader to examine in detail.