JOURNEY AFTER DEATH
Eternal Joy or Eternal Suffering
WHAT is Death? Dictionaries often define death as ‘the permanent cessation of life’. This definition reflects a negative image of death. It seems to suggest that death means the complete extinguishing of a living being after its having been alive on earth for a short while. It is as if when one dies, one ceases to exist forever.
In contrast to this, Islam presents a positive understanding of death. Islam teaches us that death is not the end of life. Rather, it marks the beginning of a new phase of our lives.
According to Islam, man has been created as an eternal being. His lifespan has been divided into two parts. The first is the pre-death phase; and the second is the post-death phase.
Whatever good you need to do to earn yourself a good life after death, you should do it today, because tomorrow you may no longer be alive.
The pre-death phase of our lives is a time for us to make preparations for our post-death phase, the life that is to come after we die. The post-death phase is where we will reap the results of all that we had done in the predeath phase of our lives.
As per God’s Creation Plan, the phase before death is our preparatory period. Accordingly, in this period we should focus completely on preparing ourselves for the eternal life to come after death. We should know that in the post-death phase that we will have to face one day, we will not have the chance to do any actions that can be of any use to us. In that phase of our life, we will only reap the fruits, sweet or bitter, of what we had sowed in our pre-death phase.
Death is a message from life, as it were. The message is "Whatever good you need to do to earn yourself a good life after death, you should do it today, because tomorrow you may no longer be alive".
When the inner man is awakened it
is no longer within an individual's
power to be cruel or unjust.