Brought Before Allah in Rows, Book in Hand

The Hadith Qudsi continues into its second part. Allah (swt) commands a servant to practise his religion as commanded, to follow the instruction of the Qurʾān and the Sunnah, to do good deeds as commanded, and to prepare himself in this way for a day when human beings, in vast groups, flock upon flock, will be brought before Allah (swt) to give account of their lives. For every breath granted, in the limited time and space allowed on this earth, a person will be questioned — every breath, without exception, whether a prophet of Allah or an ordinary Muslim in the street. Shaykh Muḥammad Zāhid Kotku (may Allah have mercy on him) used to say, in a saying often recalled, that this is the bottom line of Islam: out of the finite, numbered breaths given to a person — a couple of billion, a couple of million, however many — how many of them were spent remembering Allah, following His command, and how many were spent ignoring Him? That is the question. Just as a shopkeeper — a milk bar, a supermarket, a pizza shop — presses the till at the close of the day and reads the total, whether the day ended in the red or in the black, so it is on the Day of Judgment: Allah (swt) is going to ask, Allah (swt) is going to question, whether a person likes it or not. So a servant is to prepare for the day of being brought in these large groups, to come before Allah (swt), to be judged by Him.

The Hadith Qudsi continues: not only will people be brought in these groups; they will be made to stand before Allah (swt) in rows, exactly as in prayer, with no option in the matter, and nothing will be missed — everything in absolute order. In the courts of this world, a person who falsifies the books, or burns the documents, so that nobody knows and no evidence remains, may well be acquitted for lack of proof; before Allah (swt), no hidden evidence is ever missed. On that day, Allah (swt) says, all secrets shall be exposed. The kind of secrets meant are not unfamiliar in an age of computers: hard discs, embedded software to hide files from parents, files kept password-protected — the haram material, say, that nobody is meant to access, or else files hidden with the excuse of protecting one's own children from coming across them — or crucial financial data kept from others besides. On the Day of Judgment there is no password and no secret; everything is brought into the open, and it is found written, in a book, as a record of a person's own actions, written continuously by the two angels appointed to record it, Raqīb and ʿAtīd, the noble recorders, kirāman kātibīn. Once a person is made to stand before Allah (swt), row upon row, ready to be reckoned with, when his number comes, when his name is called, the book is handed to him, word for word, letter by letter, to be read — this is the reality, whether one likes it or not.

Perhaps, it might be said, the angels write slowly, or however one imagines it — but in the present age there is a nearer comparison: it is as if a constant surveillance camera were trained on a person throughout life, not merely one recording a flat, two- or three-dimensional image, but one that reads the heart and the intention, what passes through the mind, what the nafs is thinking, measuring even a person's sincerity, ikhlāṣ, or the lack of it. Everything is written there, constantly recorded. Put this to a Muslim from fourteen hundred years ago, who had no difficulty believing it even without any such comparison to hand: how many books would it take — if a person wrote for eighty years, would there be eighty or ninety thousand of them? In the present age, with the microchip to think of, the same thing is believed with even less difficulty: everything has been recorded by Allah (swt), to be exposed on the Day of Judgment, the book of a person's deeds. The sinners, the criminals, the mujrimīn, who disobeyed Allah, shown their books, will say: what kind of book is this? — nothing is left out, small or great, but has been recorded, all of it.

This is the belief: a person will stand before Allah (swt) with this book. One who did good deeds is, alḥamdulillāh, the proudest person there — hoping, in shāʾ Allāh, for Allah's forgiveness, and, as Allah (swt) has promised, there is no difficulty in it: a Muslim who kept his ṣalāh five times daily, who established it as ʿimād al-dīn, the very backbone of his religion, and did his best to live well, will have Allah (swt) pass through his book in less time than it takes to pray four rakʿahs, four or five minutes — Allah (swt) says, go. A sinner, however, one heedless in his religious duty, a fāsiq, will have his book opened before everyone, and be questioned and exposed at length, and humiliated; nobody in that gathering is in any hurry, because there is nothing but eternity ahead — the reckoning may take thousands of years, and nobody hurries another along in the queue, since nobody particularly wishes to reach the front of it either. This is reason enough to think about where a person is going, what he is doing, what his aim and objective in life actually are, and where the lifestyle he has adopted is actually taking him. One who is a good Muslim, a ṣāliḥ or ṣāliḥah, at a young age, has good foundations and nothing much to worry about: one who practises his religion, unashamed, wherever he happens to be — at school, at work, in the street, at the hour of ṣalāh saying Allāhu Akbar regardless of who is watching, proud to be a Muslim whatever the rest of the world does — and a woman who wears the ḥijāb as her flag, without a shadow of doubt in her heart, comfortable and proud to show it, need have little difficulty on that day, alḥamdulillāh.