Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

Wa-lā yaẓlim Rabbuka aḥadan
—and your Master is not going to do wrong to
anybody. Nobody’s going to wonder why am I being thrown into Hell? Nobody
will wonder; they will know exactly what they did. Every little detail, so before
they go, they will know.
The final comment about this 
āyah
as I close, 
in shā
’
 Allāh taʿālā
is that, in
this world sometimes you have secret courts and secret trials and people are
sentenced to prison but when they are sentenced to prison you don’t know what
the evidence was; why were they considered a criminal? All the evidence is
secret, we don’t even know. When it’s secret somebody could say, ‘Well, they
are probably innocent that’s why they are keeping it a secret’, right? Because
secret trials usually mean there is going to be some kind of corruption. If you
have nothing to hide, make it open. Same way in a classroom; you fail a student,
he gets an F and you don’t even show him his exam. Student says where is my
exam? ‘No, no you got an F’, ‘But can I see what my mistakes were?’, ‘No you
can’t see, you just got an F. You failed! Get out’. ‘Let me see what I did at
least!’ If you don’t show him what he did and he failed then he might think, ‘He
just hates me, he failed me. That’s why he failed me because he doesn’t even
want to show me my deeds’.
Allah says: no, no, no. I will show you every last detail of what you did—
ṣāghīrah wa-kabīrah
—small and big, and He started with small ones, the small
things. Because you and I think the only things that are going to be on our record

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is the big stuff. Little things on a day to day basis: who cares? He started with
the small things. He started with that, and He said I’ll show you first, then the
Judgement, so you have no complaints about how We reached this Judgement,
subḥān Allāh
.
May Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
) make us of those who really understand the value
of this life and how this life is supposed to be an investment towards our
ākhirah
. May Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
) make us of the people who are not shy to
advise one another and give each other counsel about the temporary nature of
this life. May Allah (
ʿazza wa-jall
) not make us a people of 
dunyā
but rather
make us a people of 
ākhirah
who put this 
dunyā
to work to build their 
ākhirah
.

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CHAPTER 13
Naṣīḥah
in Brief: The Afterlife
I
n these few remaining paragraphs I want to share with you a reminder about
the early revelations of the Qur’an. One of the themes that is highlighted more
than perhaps any other in our 
dīn
is the concept of the afterlife: the Day of
Judgement, Paradise, Hellfire, the Reckoning, the world coming to an end and us
being raised again for another life after this one. It’s a recurring theme, it keeps
coming up over, and over again and is discussed in a lot of detail. The question
arises why? What are the benefits of having that as the main central discourse in
Islam and especially in the early revelations when the foundations of the faith
were being set.
Essentially the idea is captured in, for example, one place in the Qur’an:
Nay; the truth is that you love ardently (the good of this world) that
can be obtained hastily, and are oblivious of the Hereafter.
(Al-Qiyāmah 75: 20-21)
Kallā bal tuḥibbūn al-ʿājilah wa-tadharūn al-ākhirah
(
al-Qiyāmah
75: 20-
21)—No indeed! You love to rush, human nature is that it loves to rush. We like
to consume things and get things to come our way quickly, especially good
things; or we want bad things to be removed from ourselves quickly,
immediately. So this mentality was challenged, and as a result of which you like

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to put the eventual thing off and even the afterlife off. So if somebody tells you,’
You should worry about your salvation’, which is obviously a concern after you
die, you respond: ‘Well, I got bigger things right now to worry about; I got a job,
I got finances, I got family issues, I got personal things. Whatever I have to do
right now is a bigger priority for me as opposed to whatever is coming later’.
So what the Qur’an does is it gives us a bigger picture, in other words
nothing I do is any longer trivial, it’s no longer meaningless. Allah says:
Did you imagine that We created you without any purpose, and that
you will not be brought back to Us?
(Al-Mu’minūn 23: 115)
A-fa-ḥasibtum annamā khalaqnākum ʿabathan wa-annakum ilaynā lā
turjaʿūn
(
al-Mu’minūn
23: 115). It’s very interesting, Allah says ‘Have you
assumed that We created you without purpose, and that you won’t be returned to
Us?’ In other words, returning to God in itself is a very powerful indication that
everything you do has purpose. My actions don’t die with time; whatever I do,
its consequences are recorded and they are going to have repercussions in this
world and especially repercussions in the next. Some of the benefits of this are,
of course: Firstly, it makes me conscious of my actions. I start thinking not just
of the consequences they’re going to have here but later on also. It removes from
me the idea that nobody saw what I did. That’s gone. God saw what I did and
it’s on record and I’m going to have to answer for it. Secondly, there will be
accountability for everything that I do. Thirdly, I realize that as a result I have to
keep turning back to God for forgiveness, because there are a countless number
of mistakes I make all the time. So it makes me a person that seeks God’s
forgiveness all the time, seeks Allah’s forgiveness. As a result I become closer
and closer to Allah, closer to God. So the concept of the afterlife actually drives
me to become closer to Allah, because the focus in Islam is always Allah. It goes
back to Allah every time. Even if the conversation is about Paradise or Hellfire,
the point of it is to take us back to Allah, Himself.
Finally and most importantly, we don’t think of anything as trivial. In other
words, we don’t think of our time in this world as trivial; this little bit of time

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that we have on this earth, compared to the actual life span that Allah has given
me, determines everything. In other words when He, Almighty, created me—this
is even before the creation of generations of people. Our souls (
arwāḥ
) were
created, and one of them is picked by the angel and dropped into the belly of a
mother so that she can deliver this child; but all of us are created before even the
earth and we were asked a question about our faith even before we came to this
earth. Then after we die from here we are going to go into another state of life,
and it’s going to go on for generations. For some people, that life in the grave
that they are going through, they’ve been going through it for thousands of
years. They’ve been in there. That’s another phase of life. We don’t see it as
death; we see it as another stop in the journey of life.
So when you compare all these stops in the journey of life you will realize
that 
this
life, meaning from my birth to my worldly death, is the shortest stop in
this journey—the shortest span. When you realize that, then you also realize this
tiniest space, this tiniest lifetime that I have, this will determine all of my future.
My eternal life is based on these very few moments, so my time is no longer
trivial. I have to make the best of it; I have to make the most of it. There is no
such thing as free time for me now. What the afterlife does is give me respect for
my time. A sense of urgency to accomplish more and more good and to get away
from more and more evil; it destroys laziness inside me. So, if I find, and if you
find yourself being lazy then you have to ask whether or not your beliefs in the
afterlife are concrete enough. Maybe you need more reminders about the
afterlife because they necessarily give you a sense of urgency. And for those of
you who think, ‘Well, Judgement Day, Paradise, Hellfire, it’s so far away’, what
does Allah Himself say:
(6) Verily they think that the chastisement is far off,
(7) while We think that it is near at hand.
(Al-Maʿārij 70: 6-7)
Innahum yarawnahū baʿīdan wa-narāhu qarīban
(
al-Maʿārij
70: 6-7)—no
doubt they see it far away; We see it near. I hope this reminder, and the
reminders that preceded it, were of some benefit to you. I personally benefit

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from reminding myself that all of us have to rejuvenate ourselves to better use
our time, especially through a reminder of the 
ākhirah
. May Allah give all of us
success in the afterlife.
Wa-ākhir daʿwānā an-al-ḥamd li-Llāh
Rabb al-ʿālamīn
.

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Glossary