I think that most of the world, and hence most of the audience of the World Service, would live much closer to death than we do in the west. For many, life is a struggle for daily survival, not a concern that they are destroying the future through the by-products of technology and excess consumption. Yet it is they who suffer most from any eco-catastrophe. We are just starting to feel the fear of what we have been doing to ourselves.

When I was young, I was told the story of Noah and the Ark. In those days it seemed as real as any of the fairy tales I heard at the same time, but as I grew older and began to be more concerned with what was true and what was false, I soon discarded Noah as myth along with the heroes of the fairy tales, and the cataclysmic deaths brought by the Flood were less frightening to me than the bloodless black and white deaths I saw in war films at the cinema.

We faced death playing war games with imaginary guns, but our bullets didn't hurt, and after dying spectacularly we always got up to fight the war again. Real death was hidden behind hospital doors. People passed away quietly and discreetly, no fuss, just like going on an unexpected journey. I never saw blood or pain, or the fear of death on the face of anyone, so my death, let alone the death of the world, meant very little to me.

Yet by the time I was an adult, in hospital for an operation, I had learned it was a privilege to face death with ample warning, with "there is no god but God" upon my lips as the syringe put me to sleep for what I thought might be the very last time. Now that I'm back, that awareness of the nearness of death is impossible to sustain, even though I strangely miss the simple clarity it brought into my life, reducing other worries to their true minimal importance in the eternal scheme of things.

The threat of death on a massive scale, as encountered in natural disasters, is rare in this part of the world. Such things seem remote and unlikely to affect us personally. On TV we see the world's floods and volcanoes, its earthquakes and tornadoes, but like the people of Noah we never think that it will happen to ourselves. And we see such events as natural, unavoidable, not something that we can influence, though the greatest threat to life on the planet today is not nature, but man. Not just the combination of this century's technology with man's thirst for genocide, we are surrounded on all sides by impending doom from a variety of high-tech disasters. Yet still we are too proud to change and ask our Maker for assistance.

The end of all humanity has never been so close, and the approach of Armageddon seems unstoppable. The world has to face the simultaneous effects of deforestation, nuclear radiation, atmospheric pollution and chemical waste, climatic changes from global warming, impending floods from the melting icecaps, and the spreading hole in the ozone layer. But still we will not look death in the eye.

When it comes to thoughts of our own death, we would rather be distracted. We frighten ourselves with horror movies, and tales of alien invasions, but we know it's not the aliens we should fear. What is really frightening is that we choose to do it to ourselves. God says in the Qur'an "We do not change a people until they change themselves", but we need the will to change things, the strength to make the effort, and the humility to ask for God's help to put right what we have ruined before it's too late.

[From the Qur'an, the chapter called The Darkening vv. 1-29]

When the sun shall be darkened, when the stars shall be thrown down, when the mountains shall be set moving, when the pregnant camels shall be neglected, when the savage beasts shall be mustered, when the seas shall be set boiling, when the souls shall be coupled, when the buried infant shall be asked for what sin she was slain, when the scrolls shall be unrolled, when heaven shall be stripped bare, when Hell shall be set blazing, when Paradise shall be brought nigh, then shall a soul know what it has produced.

No! I swear by the slinkers, the runners, the sinkers, by the night swarming, by the dawn sighing, truly this is the word of a noble Messenger, having power, with the Lord of the Throne secure, obeyed, and trustworthy. Your companion is not possessed; he truly saw him on the clear horizon; he does not withhold knowledge of the Unseen. Nor is it the word of an accursed Satan. Where then are you going? It is naught but a Reminder unto all beings, for whosoever of you who would go straight; but will you shall not, unless God wills, the Lord of all the worlds.