Among the transcendental truths we are called upon to
believe live in, as a matter of fundamental necessity, one is concerning
the Hereafter. 'Faith in God', as in the following two verses. As believe
in God and the Last Day.
(_Quran : Baqar, 22 )
If they have faith in God and the Last Day.
(_Quran : Baqar, 15 )Faith in the Hereafter implies, in a word, placing
of one's complete trust in the revelation made by the Prophets that, at
the end of this mortal life, there is to come another life and another
world in which men will be required for the good or evil they might have
done during their earthly sojourn.
On the subject of the further world, this much, at least, can be realized
by everyone, without any external persuasion, that there ought to be some
existence on the other side of death for men to reap the consequences
of their doings in material life. We see around us people who, in spite
of all their cruelty and wickedness, spend their days in utmost comfort
and happiness. Throughout there lives they commit great sins, they loot
and plunder and deprive others of their justified claims, they oppress
the weak and torment the poor, and yet no calamity befalls them and they
live in uninterrupted peace and luxury till the end of their time. At
the same time, there are men who are pious and virtuous, they neither
deceive nor swindle nor subject anyone to cruelty or injustice, they are
loyal to God and his creatures, and, with all this their lives are filled
with pain and poverty.
Some- times there is disease, sometimes some other distress till the journey's
end is reached. Now, When this world is of God's creation and He sees
everything, and we, on our part, find that here neither the virtuous are
rewarded for their virtue nor the wicked punished for their sins, it automatically
comes to our minds that reward and punishment from God should then be
meted
out in some other existence. It cannot be that God allows such gross injustice,
which makes no distinction between right and wrong and treats the righteous
and the wrong-doers alike. What to speak of him, such conduct would not
be worthy of an ordinary gentleman. Says He : Shall we, then, treat (alike)
the people of faith with the people of Sin? (Quran:Qalam, 2 ) Furthermore,
everything in the world is endowed with some properties and the capacity
to produce a certain reason. So also do all physical act of a man bring
about, as a matter of course, some reciprocal responsive effects within
himself : when he eats his appetite is appeased as a natural consequence
of the act; when he drinks his thirst is quenched; over-eating gives him
indigestion; and when he swallows poison, it kills him. And his normal
and spiritual acts being manifestly of a much greater signi ficance than
the physical ones, it is impossible that they may not react upon him one
way or the other, and produce no results, good or evil, for him. A man
gives his food or drink to the needy and goes without it himself, takes
care of the sick, the indigent, the orphan and the widow, and spends his
hard earned money on them, and along with it, he is also a devout person,
he worships God and follows his commands faithfully; how, on earth, it
be acceptable to human or conscience that these noble deeds of his should
bear no fruit, or that the fruit they bore should not be of higher qualityand
merit than those borne out by his physical doings?
Conversely, a man is cruel and unkind; he tyrannizes over the weak and
the powerless, is treacherous and a cheat, accepts bribe, commits robbery
or sheds blood without reason; in brief, he is an embodiment of all that
is despicable and foul; common sense will naturally demand that the consequences
of his misdeeds should be equally worse and that they should reveal themselves
in due course. When a person cannot make the slightest material folly
and get away with it, there seems no reason why it should be different
on the moral and spiritual planes. The same process of reasoning has been
pursued in the Quran in this verse : What! do those who seek after evil
ways think that we shall hold them equal with those who believe and do
righteous deeds,_that equal will be their life and their death? Ill is
the judgement they make. (Quran : Jathiya, 2 )In short, as we observe
on all sides, that the effects of the material and physical acts of man
make themselves felt in this world while his moral and spiritual behaviour
yields no apparent results, we become conscious of the need of a future
state where it may bear fruit in the shape of reward or punishment.
The great wisdom behind this arrangement is that if requital for good
or evil was to be portioned out in this life, it would cease to be the
trial God has intended it to be and which reason he has made it known
through the Prophets that those who will obey His commands and lead a
life of piety will be rewarded in the world to come with such-and-such
blessings and those who will behave otherwise will be punished in such-and-such
ways. Were the recompense for every good or evil deed to be handed over
at once, the trial would be reduced to a farce, and reward and punishment
would lose all meaning for people would then avoid sin as fearfully as
they do plunging into the fire, and practice virtue as a matter of habit
like eating and drinking. Morever, the favours God proposes to bestow
upon his loyal servants cannot be possible in this material world. In
the same way, it cannot withstand the terrible Chastisement he has in
store for those who are defiant and go astray. The chastisement is so
serve that if it is revealed here it will destroy all the peace and happiness
there is in the world and burn it down to extinction.
This world is, after all, a weakling and its resources are grievously
limited. Again, the pattern of things here is such that joys and sorrow
are closely woven into each-other, whereas the reward God has designed
for the faithful and the dreadful punishment He has got ready for the
transgressors can be possible only in surroundings, respectively, of cloudless
bliss and unmitigated suffering. Anyhow, it is the will of God that he
will requite His servants for their deeds in the next world. That world
is the Hereafter and it is divided, into two parts, Heaven and Hell. In
the Heaven there will be the display of God's special Grace and Benevolence
and in the Hell of his Severity and warth, and both of these displays
will be in their highest forms. It is only there that the Divine Glory
will reveal itself in full splendour. For the full exhibition of Divine
Benevolence and Anger, too, therefore, it is necessary that there be another
existence with its Heaven and Hell because though these attributes are
revealed here in this world also, it is on a very limited scale.
The material world cannot cope with an unrestricted display of his qualities.
In this display, indeed, lies the very purpose of creation. God has fashioned
all that exists in order that His excellent Attributes may find expression.
If the possibility of a future world be ruled out, how is this purpose
going to be fulfilled? For this reason, also, the Hereafter becomes a
necessary. In addition to these things, the Hereafter plays a powerfull
role in the reformation of our lives. No one with any knowledge of history
or capacity for thinking can deny that no human arrangement or farmula
of righteous conduct has succeeded in discouraging people more effectively
from evil doing than the belief in futurity. Punitive legislation, cultural
advancement, moral consciousness and such-like things do help in the suppression
of crime and immorality, but they are not as striking in their usefulness
as faith in reward and punishment after death, provided of course, that
this faith is a real, live one and not a meaningless formality. it is
no empty concept of philosphy but a fact supported by the experience of
the ages that the more bereft a society is of faith in futurity and God's
last judgement, the more open is it to folly and sin. People in whose
hearts the light of faith does burn shrink back from the thought of evil.
History tells that the cleanest, purest and noblest lives have been those
of men who were charged with a glowing faith in Resurrection and the final
Requital.
This conviction acts as a strong deterrent even when there is no one to
see or to punish. So, the setting up of another world at the end of the
present one in a reality as promised by the Divine Apostles, as well as
a necessity according to our own understanding and it is to our own advantag
to believe in it. The details about the world of Requital can, however,
only be known through the Prophets. It is beyond the realm of controversy
that all the Prophets during their lifetime imparted to their people what
they needed knowing about God's Final Judgement and Heaven and Hell, but
their followers did not pay enough attention to the preservation of their
teachings with the result that much of what they preached was either lost
or driven out of shape with the passage of the centuries. Now the only
authentic knowledge available to us is that supplied by the last of the
Prophet, Muhammad (Peace and blessings of Allah be on him), and the Quran,
which is maintained intact to this day, and contains nothing that may
be repugnant to logic or reason. It is another matter that since we have
no personal knowledge or experience of the future world, the idea of it
may sound to us rather strange.But it is exactly like this that is if
it could be possible, by any means, to tell a child which was still in
its mother's womb that it was about to come out into a world that was
thousands of times larger, with its vast stretches of land and sea and
in which there was the measureless sky, the sum, the moon and the stars,
and where the railway trains ran, the airplanes flew and wars were fought
and atom bombs dropped, it would, surely, be very difficult for it to
lend credence to it all for the simple
reason that the world it had known so far was but the tiny pouch within
the belly of its mother. It is just the same with us about the world to
come. It is a fact that the future world will be as immeasurably more
extensive and advanced compared to the present one as the present one
is compared to mother's womb, and just as, on comming into the world,
the child sees with its own eyes every thing it could never dream of in
the narrow cell of the mother's belly, we also will see in the further
state all that the prophets have told about it. In sum, the description
of the hereafter given by the Prophets is entirely true and with out the
semblance of an error or mis statement. Faith and common sense, both,
demand that we should repose our whole-hearted trust in it. In the customary
course, in matters we are ingorant about we go by the advice of those
whose wisdom and integrity are above suspicion in our eyes. We, accordingly,
affirm our fullest faith in what the Holy Prophet and the Quran have told
us about the intervening period between death and Resurrection, about
the happenings in the grave, and about the rising again of men on the
last day, God's final Judgement and Heaven and Hell, and believe with
all our hearts that all this will come to pass exactly as they have said.
This is what affirmation of faith in the Hereafter means. Needless to
add, that, after having brought faith in God and the Hereafter, it becomes
our bounden duty to discard the undisciplined life of the animals and
devote ourselves earnestly to a life of submission and surrender to God
in order that our maker and master, who does hold everything in the palm
of his hand, may be benevolently inclined towards us and we may succeed
in everting His wrath in the never-ending existence of the Futurity and
in gaining that paradise and those other exquisite favours He has so graciously
promised to his Loyal servants.
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