The Hardest Question in Philosophy - Nouman Ali Khan
Human beings are on a journey,
and their journey did not begin when they were born.
Islam came and said,
that your journey began many many many years ago.
As a matter of fact,
your journey began at the same time as
when Adam (عليه السلام) was created.
All of the arwah, all of you, and I were created.
And we were actually asked by Allah, if...
Allah asked us directly,
"(أَلَسْتُ بِرَبِّكُم)" (QS Al A'raf: 172)
"Am I not your Master?"
We all responded, "Of course, You are."
That's when our journey began.
We all knew Allah.
And then what Allah decided was,
He would take one of those souls,
-for lack of better words in English-
and He would take an angel,
and deliver that into the bellies of their mothers,
at a certain point during the pregnancy.
And that would be the second part of our journey,
from being in the company of Allah
to inside the stomach of our mothers.
And the third part of our journey would be,
when, "(مَّ ٱلسَّبِيلَ يَسَّرَهُ)" (QS Abasa: 20)
Which later on,
we would come out of our moms
and our life in this world would begin.
Our life didn't begin
when we were born out of our mothers.
Our life began much before then.
Our physical body, yes, it's started then.
And then we are in this life,
but that's not the end of...
death is not the end of our journey.
Death is actually the next important stop.
And then begins a life
that's going to be the life of questioning.
The life of being accountable for
what we did in this life.
What we did in this interim period.
And that's gonna be the life that many people will spend
inside their graves.
And from there, the next... next...
you know, space will begin.
When Allah will command,
and everyone who's left alive will also die.
And then another time it will be blown into,
the horn will be blowing too.
And everyone will be raised again.
All of humanity will be raised again,
will be brought back to life,
even though were decayed for
thousand hundreds of thousands of years.
When we all come back together,
then Allah will question every single human being,
for how they live their life.
All of their deeds will be judged.
And then there are two conclusions,
two destinations to go.
It's either eternal heaven or eternal hell.
Those are the two destinations.
They're pretty powerful statements to make.
Because now you are saying human beings,
you know, maybe asked,
"Where did I come from? Where am I going?"
It's answering that question, isn't it?
"What is the meaning of life?"
"What is my life amount to?"
These are the oldest questions in philosophy,
and the Quran is claiming it has the answer
to those questions.
That's not a small thing.
It's something that
virtually every philosopher, every society,
every religion in the world,
tries to answer this question.
"What is the meaning of life?"
"What is gonna happen after we die?"
"Is that all it was?"
And for some, we just blend into nature.
We become one with nature.
Some believe we come back as
cockroaches, or cats, or dogs.
Some others believe we don't come back at all.
We're done.
Some others, you know,
we're eternal, or become part of God,
or whatever other philosophies there are.
There are so many views.
And so when this surah begins,
(عَمَّ يَتَسَآءَلُونَ) (QS An Naba: 1)
"What are they asking about?"
It's actually one of those views is
the view Allah presented.
What's the view that Allah presented?
There is in fact a day on
which everything you did in this life
is going to be brought back to you.
Not just you'll be brought back to life,
everything you did is on record,
and it's gonna be questioned about.
What that does is that...
It's of all the options that are out there,
this is like the hardest one.
Like of all the theories
you could give me of an afterlife.
The one that makes the scares me the most
is the one where I'll be interrogated,
and nothing I did, went unrecorded.
Everything was under surveillance.
And so it's hard to swallow that one.
It's hard to accept that one.
(لِّلطَّـٰغِينَ مَـَٔابًۭا) (QS An Naba: 22)
It's actually those
who don't want to listen to any rules.
People who wanna just do what they wanna do.
Like we say in modern language now,
"Let me live my life, man."
"Just let me live, how I wanna live."
"I don't want to listen to anybody."
"Just leave me alone, I just wanna be free."
Those people are most agitated
by the notion of a day of resurrection.
They're most disturbed by it.