It’s not an end

June 2006, Al-Qalam

In my last column, I focussed on the miracles – physical, emotional and psychological – of birth. I, therefore, thought it appropriate to focus, in this column, on the event that the very occasion of birth begins preparing us all for: death. Indeed, for the Muslim baby, it is as if the moment of birth is a call to the end of life as the adhaan is recited into the baby’s ears. After all, there is no adhaan before the funeral prayer; the adhaan at birth seems to suffice.

Allah reminds us in the Qur’an of the inevitability of death, the fact that no human will be able to escape it. “Every soul will taste death,” Allah says in 3:185. And, again in 4:85: “Death will overtake you no matter where you may be, even in high towers.” However, it is not only inevitable; one’s demise is also completely out of one’s control. “No soul will die,” we are told, “except with Allah’s permission at a predestined time” (3:145). It is Allah’s determination when death occurs and under what circumstances. Often, our attempts to impute meaning about the goodness or otherwise of a person to the manner of his death are often more our attempts to understand and our hopes for the person than the reality. The only reality is that Allah is in charge of and has control over our deaths.

Part of that reality, too, is that death is a return to our Creator. “Every soul is certain to taste death: We test you all through the bad and the good and to Us you will all return,” Allah reminds us in 21:35. Again, in 29:57: “Every soul will taste death, then it is to us that you will be returned.” The return to Allah, of course, is regardless of the character of a person or the life she led in this world; all souls will return to Allah. Death is not an end, simply a transition into a new life, a life in the presence of the Creator.

And because it is a new beginning rather than an end, those who are sincere in their faith are not afraid of it and embrace it without concern. We are reminded of this in Allah’s instruction to the Prophet (s) to issue a challenge to the Jews of Madinah: “Say (O Prophet): ‘You who follow the Jewish faith, if you truly claim that out of all people you alone are friends of Allah, then you should be hoping for death’” (62:6).

For most people, their deaths signal the completion of their tasks in this world. Once they are done, they move on. To think that remaining behind, holding on and refusing to let go, refusing to surrender, is a virtue, is incorrect. Islam places an enormous amount of emphasis on life. To save the life of one person is as if one has saved the entire humanity, and to take the life of one person is as if one has killed all of humanity, we are told in the Qur’ān. Yet there is no great value in simply continuing to be alive. We live in a society where too much emphasis is placed on simply being alive – irrespective of the quality of that life.

If non-Muslim commentators were able to understand such a perspective on death, they would more easily understand the phenomenon of martyrdom bombers and would have no need to fantasise about virgins in heaven or try to create mythical biographies of personal suffering of the bombers.

I recall that when my wife was ill with cancer and we had made the decision to end all her therapy, it was with the knowledge that she would die not long thereafter. But it was also with the understanding that it was more important for her to have a productive, constructive and fulfilling rest of her life than for it to be stretched out to the maximum in terms of time but with her sick and in bed. Terminating her treatment meant shortening her life (theoretically, because only Allah decides on the length of one’s life), but it also meant ensuring that the short life that she had left would be well-lived. And so she spent the next few months going for hajj, co-authoring a book, fulfilling numerous speaking and writing engagements (sometimes travelling across the country to do so). When she was done, when her task was fulfilled, her soul returned to Allah.

The willingness to embrace death, though, should not be interpreted as an obsession with dying. Indeed, while one should be so confident in one’s relationship with one’s Creator that one would be prepared to die in the next moment, one should live one’s life in this world as if one would live forever. One should be prepared to confront Allah at any time, knowing that one has fulfilled the requirements for such a confrontation. At the same time, one plans for one’s activities in this world for the long term, laying the ground for all the good things one would like to do – as if one will be able to do them all without being interrupted by death. There is a very interesting hadith from the Prophet Muhammad (s) in the latter regard. “If the last hour strikes and you are carrying a sapling to the grove for planting,” he said, “plant it!”