The Meaning and truth of death!

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

Image: death

'Every soul will taste death"

(The Holy Quran 2:185)

What is death? Is it total annihilation? Or is it simply the severing of the soul from the body? When the soul is separated from the body, what happens to each of them? What happens to man himself, the owner of this transient body and eternal soul? Does his consciousness come to an end when his body dies? Or does his awareness continue to live on in his eternal soul? Do the dead feel enjoyment and pain the way the living do? Can the awareness of a living man whose soul is locked in his body compare with the awareness of a dead man whose soul has been released from his body?

Naturally the answer to this last question is, No! The living is aware and the dead are aware. But there is a difference and there is no way to compare them. Death is not pure annihilation. It is merely movement from one world to another. When the dead man feels the bliss or punishment of the grave, it does not mean that he is alive in his grave, needing food, clothes and so on. Nor does it mean that his soul permeates all the parts of his body as it did when he was in this world. The soul returns to the body again in a way which is not the same as in this world so that the dead man can be questioned and tested in the grave.

We can get some idea of this by likening death to sleep which is the 'lesser death', even though there is of course a natural disparity between the two. In sleep, a man's soul out though his nostrils and travels until it comes into the presence of the Lord of the Throne. If the sleeper is in a state of purity, his soul prostrates before its Creator. Then it may encounter the world of dreams or meet with the souls of people who have died, but what it is in fact faced with is a page of Allah’s knowledge of the Unseen containing the good or evil He has decreed for this particular human being. If the sleeper is truthful, generous, and pure, and someone who does not concern himself with stupid things during the time he is awake, then when his soul returns to him it conveys to his heart the truth of what Allah, the Great and Majestic, has let him see. When this happens, it is called a 'truthful dream'.

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