How Allah's Forgiveness Reaches a Sin

How does Allah (swt) wash it away? Beyond imagination. If a person is wronged — insulted, humiliated, embarrassed in public, slandered, defamed — that person may forgive but never forgets; he does not want to associate with the one who wronged him again, saying: "I forgive you, but keep away from me — every time I see you I am reminded, and I go through it again." That is how forgiveness between human beings usually works — remembered each time the wrongdoer is seen.

How does Allah's (swt) forgiveness work? What does maghfirah mean? The word means complete covering: the helmet, the armour a warrior wears, is called mighfar in Arabic — complete protection, so that nothing can touch what lies beneath. When Allah (swt) forgives a servant, He covers everything. What does a sin involve? It involves the limbs that committed it, the angels who wrote it down and never leave, and the very place, the makān, where it was committed — the ground itself will testify against the person on the Day of Judgement, giving evidence, as the word is understood, against him.

So a person asks Allah (swt) for forgiveness. According to a ḥadīth of the Prophet (peace be upon him), when Allah (swt) forgives a servant, He first deletes the sin from His own memory: it is as if He can no longer remember it. Then the angels who wrote it in the book have it deleted from that book, and deleted from their own memory too — subḥānAllāh, wonderful, extraordinary.

What of the limbs that committed the sin — the hand that held the glass of alcohol, the stomach, the legs that carried a person to the place of gambling? Allah (swt) removes the memory of it from the limbs as well. On the Day of Judgement, as Allah (swt) says in Sūrat Yā Sīn, mouths will be shut, unable to speak — because when a human being sees Jahannam, he wants to deny it: I did not do this, I did not do this. With the mouth silenced, the limbs begin to speak instead, the hands, the feet, giving testimony, and the sinner turns on them: what are you doing, we are going to Jahannam together. The limbs answer that they were entrusted to him as an amānah, a trust, and that he did not follow Allah's (swt) commandment with them; they themselves, created by Him, cannot disobey Him — He commands them to speak, and here they are, testifying. But where Allah (swt) forgives, He removes the memory of the sin from the limbs and from the place where it was committed as well.

Rasūlullāh (peace be upon him) says, in a different ḥadīth, that when a Muslim prays beneath a tree, that tree feels such pride against every other tree around it, until the Day of Judgement — it declares: "Beneath me a Muslim once made sajdah; none of you had a Muslim making sajdah beneath you; I am better than you." That place will testify for a person on the Day of Judgement. This is the positive side. On the negative side, the places where shirk, kufr, and every disobedience against Allah (swt) were committed will likewise testify against the one who committed them there — whether or not this is believed makes no difference to whether it happens. But where Allah (swt) forgives a person, that person stands as though entirely clean: al-tāʾibu min al-dhanbi ka-man lā dhanba lah — the one who repents from a sin is like the one who never sinned — a ḥadīth recorded in Ibn Mājah. Rasūlullāh (peace be upon him) also says that remorse, the guilt felt in the heart, is itself repentance.