No, This Is Your Destiny

There is the account of a man who was driving once. He was not going that fast: around 80, less than 80. In America that is actually fast, because 65 is the speed limit. A police officer stopped him, and he asked to be let off, and so on. The officer said: "No, this is your destiny." The driver turned round and said: "What do you know about destiny? Are you religious? Are you a Christian, or whatever?" The officer said no. "So what is destiny for you?" He gave some convoluted explanation that could not be understood. The driver then gave him this description, and the officer said: "Hey, that's a good description." The driver was hoping not to be given a ticket, but the officer still gave him one. It was not too much, though; perhaps he let him off a bit lightly.

In any case, there are many aspects to this. Anyone who reads the Kitāb al-Qadar in the books of hadith finds various hadith which speak about its different aspects, and these have to be reconciled. The main thing to understand is that a great deal of this hinges on the knowledge of Allah. One thing we believe is that Allah does not force us on the basis of His knowledge. So even if He knows that somebody is going to go wrong, because what He knows is based on His eternal knowledge of what we are going to do with our free will, He lets us play it out; and then, after that, on the Day of Judgment, we will be punished. We cannot reject the fact that what we did was wrong; and Allah preserve us from being such people. But that is the way it is.

Allah does not say: very well, from the inception, these are all going to go to hell; let us just put them in hell from before; let them not even come into the world to spoil the others. So nobody can really ask Allah why He did that, why He did not do this, why He did not simply send everybody to paradise and to hell, and so on and so forth, because that is simply the way He wanted things to happen. It is, arguably, a tough way, but it is a beautiful way, because then a person gets to prove himself, and to gain the love and the tawfīq of Allah (swt). And in shāʾ Allāh, may Allah bless us, and continue to bless us, and give us His pleasure, His ultimate pleasure, on the Day of Judgment.

With all of this said, the next section of the text should be very easy, because that is what it deals with: the divine decree, the pen and the tablet.