The Importance of Suffering

The koranic narrative is built around human struggle of a difficult journey. The prophets faced their sufferings with prayer, repentance and good deeds. This is usually in contrast to the non believers facing their suffering with doubts and confusion. But despite philosophical and theological attempts to understand why human beings suffer, most of us are unsettled by this issue only when we experience suffering ourselves. For example, one of the growing concerns of to day is that of experiencing a debilitating disease. While modern life has made death a sequestered event, there has nevertheless been a rise in our fear of being diagnosed with an illness.