Some Arab tribes used to perform their circumambulation of the Ka‘bah completely bare-bodied, thinking that it brought them nearer to God. Similarly, during the pre-Islamic period (the days of ignorance) they used to abstain from certain things such as goat’s milk or meat, while starting out on Hajj, imagining that they were performing great and righteous deeds. This type of misguided action has been indulged in by people of every period. Such individuals do not include the requirements of religion in their everyday life; only on certain occasions, by paying special heed to certain irrelevant, pointless actions, they make a great show of conducting themselves according to the religion of God, and contend that by attending to trivialities, they are fulfilling God’s will to the maximum extent. God wants man to abstain from being a spendthrift; that is, he should not transgress the limits laid down by God. He should not hold permitted things as forbidden and vice versa. He should eschew shameful acts. He should abstain from whatever is evidently evil in the light of common sense. He should shun all excesses. Whenever Truth appears before him, he should accede to it, ignoring all else. He should fully cleanse himself of polytheism (ascribing partners to God). With no one should he have the sublime relationship, which is the actual right of the one and only God. It should not happen that he adopts the path of his choice and then attributes it to God without any reason; he should consistently remain a subject of God; as such he should not adopt any ways which are not proper for him as a servant of God. In the Hereafter, God’s bounties will be received as a reward; as such they will be given only to those subjects of God whom God decides to send to Paradise. Unlike these divine rewards, the bounties that are received in the world are available only for a limited period for the purposes of human trial. So one receives a share in them only in terms of his ‘test paper.’ The way to fulfill the requirements of this test is not to keep away from the worldly provisions that God has provided him for this purpose, but to use them within the limits specified for them. Man should respond to the blessing of God with gratitude and not by renunciation or a display of bravado.