Doing It Over and Over

And here is something really interesting about that. There is a book called Life After Life by Raymond Moody, and there is a section in it about suicide, in which he mentions a woman who committed suicide. She was actually declared dead, but then she was brought back to life after blood transfusions. And he interviewed her and asked her what had happened. She said she found herself doing it over and over again.

And the hadith, according to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), said that anyone who commits suicide will continue to do that with the same intensity until the Day of Judgement. Although it is not considered kufr: the person is not — if a Muslim commits suicide, they are still Muslim, and they are buried as a Muslim. But it is one of the worst things that you can do.

Anybody who is out of their mind is not held to account by the sharīʿah. If somebody was clinically depressed to the point where they were non-functional, it is hard for the accountability to be there; those things are just difficult, they are grey areas. But the idea is that if somebody really is not functioning, that accountability is based on sound intellect — that is part of accountability.

And again, in Islam, take somebody who all their life have been punished: since the time they were born, beaten as a child and all these things, and they become sociopathic. From an Islamic point of view, when they reach adulthood they are accountable; but in real terms we would say that Allah knows what is going to happen on the Day of Judgement, because the Prophet (peace be upon him) said that many parents will be taken to account for what they did to their children. Because it is the parents' responsibility; it is a trust. That is why parenthood is so strong in Islam: because it is a divine trust. Children are a trust in the hands of the parents, and if they betray the trust, then they can destroy the children.