What is life in the Next World...the world after death?

In the Name of Allah, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful

“They will ask you about the spirit. Say, “The spirit is at the behest of your Lord. You have been given only a little knowledge.”” (The Holy Qur’an 17:85)

'The living goes on and the dead do not.’... Allah! What an extraordinary expression and what an even stranger position to take. When somebody dies, our sorrow and tears, our weeping and mourning soon cease. The funeral rites, the Thursday ceremony and family the forty-day ceremony are held and then all is forgotten. We say to ourselves, 'The living goes on and the dead do not,' and put the dead person out of mind on the premise that he is dead and at rest. We forget or pretend to forget that he is in fact in even greater need of us than the living. He faces the future all alone, hidden away in the domain of the earthworms, buried under the earth in a desolate grave. He was in the light and now he is in darkness.

He was surrounded by beauty and spaciousness and now he is enclosed in narrowness and gloom. He was in bliss and he now is in torment. All this, however, is measured by criteria which are completely different from those that we, the living, use. We cannot perceive these things with our eyes or our inner senses or even our ears. The dead person is completely aware of them, but according to the criteria of the Next World. What are those criteria? What is death? What is life in the Next World...the world after death? We shall continue this in our next article “from-one-world-to-another'" In-Sha-Allah.

Courtesy: An Abridgement of Ibn Al-Qayyim’s kitabur Ruh.