Why Does God Permit Suffering On Earth

Why Does God Permit Suffering On Earth?

Introduction and Opening Supplication

We begin by praising Allah, we praise him, we seek his help and we ask for his forgiveness and we take refuge with Allah from the evil of ourselves and from the evil consequence of our evil actions. Whomsoever Allah guides, no one can misguide and whomsoever Allah leaves to go astray, no one can guide and I testify that Allah alone is worthy of worship and that Muhammad ﷺ is the servant of Allah and his final messenger.

The Foundation: Establishing God's Existence

I've been asked to talk today about the topic, Why Does God Permit Suffering On The Earth? First of all, the topic, the discussion presumes, the topic and the discussion presumes the existence of God. As long as we can agree that God does exist, that this universe does have a creator, then we can really move forward with our discussion. If you don't believe that there is a God, if you don't believe that this universe has a creator, then this talk may pass you by a little bit and you could refer to the lecture delivered by Hamza Sources yesterday or you could go on to the Big Debates website where he has debated some atheists and secularists and put forward some very strong and convincing arguments through which and by which we can know that this universe has a creator.

Rational Arguments for God's Existence

Briefly, the arguments are the need for a first cause who is uncaused, the second is the evidence of design and the fine-tuning of the universe leaves us with little rational option except to conclude that a designed and finely tuned universe must have a designer and that this being must be necessarily different in nature from the creation and therefore this being must be self-sufficient, this being must be eternal outside the confines of space and time.

These are pretty familiar arguments. I don't intend to go into the philosophical discussion as to whether we can prove the existence of God or not through these arguments or indeed what does it mean to prove anything in the first place. It's sufficient to outline that there is a rational basis, a strong rational basis to justify the existence of one eternal self-sufficient being and therefore the question that is often posed by atheists or the issue that is often raised by those people who claim that their belief is that there is no God and amongst the strongest arguments they claim they have in order to support this belief is what they call the problem of evil or the existence of evil and suffering in the earth so the argument goes pretty much like this.

The Problem of Evil: An Emotional Rather Than Rational Argument

How can a good, how can an all-good and all-loving God permit and allow suffering to exist? In fact the depth and degree of suffering that exists on the earth is so great and so severe that God or the good and loving God

cannot possibly exist since it's a contradiction in terms. However the reality is that this is not a rational argument at all. The argument is not rational, the argument is emotional because the evidences which certainly Muslims bring forward in order to rationalise their belief in the existence of one supreme transcendent creator are the ones that I have outlined to do with cause, the need for a cause, the design, the fine-tuning of the universe and these are our basic presumptions which has got nothing to do with why there is evil.

We know God exists because we believe it is irrational, improbable to ascribe to an organised systemised universe that it is a product of some random event. It is really ridiculous. A more rational explanation is that there is a creator. So the argument about evil actually has nothing to do with whether God exists or not. It's nothing to do with it, it's an emotional argument. In fact the only question that is begged by the existence of suffering is why does God permit that suffering?

The Islamic Understanding of God's Attributes

Now it may be possible that certain religions are confronted by the issue of the problem of evil and it is a lot more problematic for them than it is for the religion of Islam and that is partly because the way that God is defined in certain religions. So for example if you claim that God is love, if you claim that God is love and one claims that God loves everybody and everything and one makes such a claim about God then the problem of evil does become much more problematic. If you have such a concept of God and you have such an attribute that you ascribe to God then it does become very difficult to explain why an all-loving God allows such things to happen.

However we don't have that problem in our tradition because there is no attribute of God as being love. God is not love, God is al-Wadud, he is the loving and he is the most loving and there is nothing that can be more loving than God but he is not all-loving because that is an absolute attribute that does not allow anything that contradicts it in any single way. However we don't say as some religions that God's love is unconditional. No, God's love is conditional.

God loves those who are good and who obey him and who follow his guidance and God hates those although God does not usually in the Quran use that term hate. Usually you find the Quran says (لَا يُحِبُّ - lā yuḥibbu) which means God does not love al-fasiqeen, al-zalimeen meaning the wrongdoers, the evildoers, so even in the Quran the emphasis is more often on the fact that God does not love people who do wicked things. Yes, God is compassionate, God is merciful and that extends to all the creatures but again similarly it is not an absolute unconditional attribute.

God is also just, he is also shadid al-iqab which means he is the severe in punishment. So in Islam the Quran teaches us that God has many attributes, God has many names, God has many qualities.

The Atheist's Contradiction: Evolution and Morality

It's also interesting that when atheists raise this topic of the problem of evil it's a strangely self-contradicting

assertion from their own point of view. Let's think about this. Atheists by and large, perhaps not all of them, but I still probably have to meet an atheist who doesn't believe in the theory of evolution. In fact for atheists the theory of evolution for them is one of the strongest arguments that they use to show that we don't need a creator.

We have sufficient explanation from natural causes to explain the wide variety of life that we find on our planet. Of course it's worth noting that evolution or the process of evolution does nothing to be able to explain the fine-tuning of the universe. It does nothing to explain the alternation of the night and the day, the distance of the earth from the sun, the exact composition of the gases in our atmosphere, the chemical properties of water, the various forces that operate within the universe within such a fine degree that it would be very strange to imagine how such precision could be a product of random events.

So evolution doesn't do anything to explain those things. It can't. However still atheists for them the theory of evolution is a strong argument that they use in order to try and show that God is at least not as necessary as believers think he is. However if you believe in the theory of evolution then you must also believe that human beings are just a product of random mutation of DNA that is evolved through natural selection. And the question here is as an atheist where do you get the idea of evil from in the first place? Because since we human beings are merely animals, perhaps slightly sophisticated animals or advanced animals but the same just the same we are just animals and therefore we are just a product of the natural causes.

The Animal Kingdom Analogy: Where Does Evil Begin?

It's good to highlight this through a specific example. The specific example I'd like to give for example is you know you just watch any documentary about a nature program of one animal fighting and killing and eating another. So let's take the herds of wildebeest in the Masai Mara Park that goes between or the Serengeti as it's called between Tanzania and Kenya and these wildebeest migrate and one of the things I'm sure you've probably seen it there comes a time when they cross a certain river and the crocodiles know that it's time right for these wildebeest to cross and they're just waiting there, it's just dinner time right.

Now you know we don't sit there and look at the crocodiles and say oh my god look at that evil crocodile eating that wildebeest he's so evil and wicked. You might think that because the crocodiles are sort of bit slimy and reptilian and a wildebeest is a mammal but you know that's ridiculous they're just doing what crocodiles do.

When a lion jumps on a helpless little gazelle and rips its throat open with blood spewing everywhere you don't say what a wicked lion. The lion is just doing what the lion does. When the male shark forces itself upon the female shark it basically rapes the female shark. Well we don't call it rape we don't consider it to be evil that's just what sharks do.

So here is my question where does evil come in if we are just evolved? Surely human beings are just doing whatever human beings have evolved to do. So if we gas six million Jews we slaughter each other in Rwanda we rape we murder we steal we're just doing what human beings do. We've evolved to do that.

The Need for Transcendent Morality

The Quran as the Final Revelation

Amongst the things that prophets have been given are books, those books contain words, guidance, revelation from God, from the Creator to explain to us these things and that is of course the claim that the Muslim makes that Muhammad, may God's peace and blessings be upon him (صلى الله عليه وسلم - ṣallá-llāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam) is the last messenger and the Quran is the final revelation from the Creator. It has come with some signs, some evidences, some things through which a rational person could examine, could look, could study and reach certainty that this claim is true. When I say certainty of course I don't mean an absolute certainty, you can't reach absolute certainty merely by rationally examining these things, I don't believe anyway reason can lead generally to absolute certainty.

First Perspective: Life Is Not Pure Suffering

First of all I want to put everything into perspective. The first perspective I would like to put everything into is that I'm sure most of us would agree that it is really an exaggeration to describe life as suffering. In fact I was a Buddhist for a couple of years and one of the reasons I really felt unconvinced by Buddhism is that the premise of Buddha's philosophy was that life is suffering and that's a faulty premise and if your premise is faulty then what follows on from that is almost definitely going to be faulty. Life is not suffering, in fact I'm sure most of us would agree that the joy and the happiness that we experience in life is usually much more than the suffering that we experience and it usually happens quite fortuitously that suffering, you know we have the saying when it rains it pours, suffering tends to come in bunches and that's actually good psychologically, and good things tend to happen to us most of the time.

I don't say this is the case with every single person but to simply portray life as suffering is ridiculous. In fact most of the time human beings experience an extremely positive relationship with their life. In fact the Quran is full of warnings to human beings not to get carried away with the life of this world, not to be deceived by its pleasures and its joys. Indeed most human beings are so immersed in the pleasures of life when someone comes to tell them hey you need to know what's behind the door they say man I'm just too busy having a good time to know or even care what's behind the door.

In fact statistically by the way most people don't care, they just don't care. In this country, I don't mean on the whole planet, in this country we know it because we've done a survey, most people, about 70% of people in this country, we did a statistically sound survey, 70% of people in this country don't want to know about any religion, not Islam, not Christianity, any religion, they just don't want to know, they don't care because I presume they're just pretty busy enjoying their life, it's just fine the way it is, why would I even need to think about anything else? So that's the first perspective I'd like to put, you know this portraying life as if it's full of suffering and there's no joy, there's no happiness, as if life is full of neglect and starvation and disease whereas in fact in reality most people don't really experience that at all.

Second Perspective: The Insignificance of Humanity in the Cosmos

The second perspective I would like to paint is well let's be real, like they have that phrase let's get real about ourselves as human beings and what I find is a lot of people who talk about this and complain about this whether it's on the BBC or whoever it is, such a skewed and almost arrogant perspective. I mean from the angle from which they feel justified to question God. So let's put the human being in perspective.

Human beings are small little creatures, you just need to fly up in an aeroplane and look down and you can't even see us, we're small little creatures and if you are able to travel outside of this earth's atmosphere soon our earth would recede and become an almost insignificant dot. Indeed if you kept on going further our whole solar system including our Sun actually ends up being a small dot on the outer arm of the spiral of the outer arm of our galaxy which is called the Milky Way. The Milky Way is estimated to be 100,000 light-years across, that means if you travel non-stop for 100,000 years at the speed of light that is how long it would take you to cross our galaxy and our galaxy is one of millions of galaxies in the known universe, that's what we know.

Now I'll open the door a little bit. The Prophet Muhammad, may God's peace and blessings be upon him, he said in an authentic narration, he said the universe compared to the Kursi, which you could translate as the chair or the pedestal, or it is the greatest next greatest created thing after the universe, I don't think we think of it in a literal sense but the Kursi, the universe compared to the Kursi is like, imagine this, a ring thrown in the desert, a ring thrown in the desert, that's our universe compared to the Kursi. And the Kursi compared to the Arsh which means the throne is also like a ring thrown in the desert.

What is incredible is that the one who is above the Arsh should care about us at all, that is incredible. I mean if we were to anthropomorphize God, you know you walk along the floor, you don't care what insect you crush, what ant you crush, what animal you destroy, you drive in your car you don't really care how many bugs are splattering on your windscreen. I mean what are we? What are we? We're just dots on a dot in a galaxy that's a dot in the universe, it's a dot before the Kursi which is a dot before the Arsh, that's the perspective.

The False Claim of Being God's Children

However of course there is this what I would say is an almost arrogant assertion that you find some religions make that we are sons and daughters of God, whatever that is supposed to mean. I mean if I came today and in my glass here I had little fish and I said this is Jonah my son, you'd say but Mr. Green that's a fish. No that's my son, he has a place on the table, you know he eats dinner with us, he has his own room in the house and under our new laws the adoption papers are coming through next week, he's my son. You'd say he's a fish. You may love him like a son right but this is a fish and you are a human being, you can't take something that is not like you to be your son, it doesn't actually in language have meaning, doesn't have a meaning.

So this assertion that we are sons and daughters of God, well the Quran tells us that God is glorious above such things, God is glorious above such a thing. If God had wanted or wished to take for himself a son he would have taken something more like himself but this is the mentality we have so from that mentality comes a sort of assertion like who is God to treat us like this? It's ridiculous to think like that. In fact who are you even to question God? He can do what he likes with what he likes and who are we? What are we? Nothing, totally powerless before the power of God. We are his and this is the first therefore assertion that we need to make, we are his creatures, slaves, servants, that is all we are. We are the creatures of God, the creation of God, limited, finite, temporary, mortal, needy, that is what defines us as human beings, that is the reality of our condition. So that's the perspective I would like to put on this whole question.

Point Two: The Purpose of Human Existence

Point number two therefore, what is the purpose of our life? Why do we exist? For what? What are we human beings supposed to do with our life? This is an interesting question indeed. If I asked most people, I often do, so what are your shoes for? It's okay you can stick them out there and relax and chill out, your shoes, what are they for? Walking. And those bits of string on your shoes, what are they for? Keep them on your feet. And what's that on your face? Those help you see and make you look very intelligent, and you do indeed, to help you see. And brother what's that you've got on your head? What's that for? You don't know? And what's this for here? It's a pen right, you write with it.

I'd like you to think really about yourself, think about your body, your eyes, your nose, your tongue, your mouth, your ears, your liver, your kidneys, your lungs, every single component part of your body has a purpose. In fact when we begin to look at the whole universe it gets even more extraordinary. You know there's a moth, there is a moth, this moth lives in the Amazon jungle and the sole purpose of this moth is to eat the poo of another moth, that's what it does. There's a big moth and underneath it lives a little moth and this little moth eats the poo of that big moth. I didn't see this myself, this is something someone told me. Now if this little moth was not there then what would happen is this poo would trickle down the tree and the ants would come up and they would eat this big moth. I mean the point being is that there is a place for everything, everything has a purpose.

So now let's answer this question, what is your purpose? For what reason do you exist? And I don't by the way mean you personally, what you want to do with your life, what I mean is what is the reason and the purpose of the existence of human beings? Why do human beings exist? What is our function on this planet? You can't just say to reproduce and just exist. We've already identified your shoes have a purpose, your pen has a purpose, your ears, your nose, is it conceivable that every individual part of your body has a purpose but the totality of you does not have a purpose? Is it possible that this small moth has a purpose but you don't have a purpose?

So there is a fundamental question and that's why a lot of us have ontological anxiety, it's that question what is the purpose of life, why are we here, what's it all for? And that is also why God has told us and given us revelation to say well this is why I created you. And again my assertion is the only way to reach certainty is when the one who created us and the one who brought us into existence says I created you for this purpose.

The Quranic Answer: Created to Worship

So the Quran says: (وَمَا خَلَقْتُ الْجِنَّ وَالْإِنسَ إِلَّا لِيَعْبُدُونِ - wa mā khalaqtu-l-jinna wa-l-insa illā liyaʿbudūn) which means that God is saying I did not create the jinn and the human being except to worship me. (Quran 51:56)

I'm gonna come back to this. There are many other passages in the Quran. Let's take Surah Al-Fatihah: (إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ - iyyāka naʿbudu wa iyyāka nastaʿīn) - You alone do we worship and You alone we ask for help. (Quran 1:5)

Let's take Surah Al-Baqarah, the 21st verse: (يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ اعْبُدُوا رَبَّكُمُ الَّذِي خَلَقَكُمْ وَالَّذِينَ مِن قَبْلِكُمْ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَتَّقُونَ - yā ayyuhā-n-nāsu ʿbudū rabbakumu-llaḏī khalaqakum wa-llaḏīna min qablikum laʿallakum tattaqūn) - O mankind, worship your Lord who has created you and those who lived before you so that you may be conscious of him.

(Quran 2:21)

Third surah, verse 51 : (إِنَّ اللَّهَ رَبِّي وَرَبُّكُمْ فَاعْبُدُوهُ ۚ هَذَا صِرَاطٌ مُّسْتَقِيمٌ - ʾinna-llāha rabbī wa rabbukum faʿbudūhu, hāḏā ṣirāṭum mustaqīm) - Verily God is my sustainer as well as your sustainer so worship him alone, this is the straight way. (Quran 3:51)

And Surah number 5 verse 76 : (قُلْ أَتَعْبُدُونَ مِن دُونِ اللَّهِ مَا لَا يَمْلِكُ لَكُمْ ضَرًّا وَلَا نَفْعًا ۖ وَاللَّهُ هُوَ السَّمِيعُ الْعَلِيمُ - qul ʾataʿbudūna min dūni-llāhi mā lā yamliku lakum ḍarran wa lā nafʿan, wa-llāhu huwa-s-samīʿu-l-ʿalīm) - Say, would you worship besides God something that has no power either to harm you or to benefit you when God alone is all-hearing, all-knowing. (Quran 5:76)

And many other verses, many more, about 200 and something when I looked for this term worship.

Understanding True Worship (Ibadah)

What is this term worship? People may think oh so what I just exist just to pray, to fast, you know to whatever. No this is a very narrow secularized definition of the term worship which the word Ibadah does not mean. Ibadah is a much more comprehensive term in Arabic, it means everything which God loves and is pleased with, everything which God loves and is pleased with from the actions of the heart and the actions of the limbs. So the purpose of life is to try to do everything in a way that God loves and God is pleased with, whether it is the action of your heart like love, hope, fear, trust, reliance or reverence, intention, sincerity, these are actions of the hearts, or actions of the limbs, the things you do, the things you say, to try and do them in a way that God loves and God is pleased with.

How can we know what God loves? How can we know what God is pleased with? Again we go back to our door analogy, it is not something we can guess, it's not something we can only guess through reason, we need revelation. That is why God has sent the prophets to tell you this is the purpose of life and then to teach us how to fulfill that created purpose. So we have not been created except to worship Allah and concerning this as well Abdullah Ibn Abbas said to worship God means to know God.

Knowing God Through Opposites

So this is very important, we have been created to know God. How can we know God? Think about this, sometimes, many times, perhaps always, the only way you can truly know something is by comparing it with its opposites. Let me give you a simple example. If on this wall here I painted a white dot and I said to you all do you like my white dot that I've painted, could you tell me where it is? But if the whole wall was black and then I painted a white dot you'd be able to identify it quickly wouldn't you?

You see this is the reality. How do we know what is goodness if there is not evil? How do we know what is order if there is not randomness? How do we know what is health if there is not sickness? How do we know what is sin if there is not good deeds? How do we know what is eternal and infinite and self-sufficient if we do not experience its opposite, ie that which is temporary and finite and needy? And therefore the universe is created in order for us to be able to understand the lofty attributes, the perfect attributes of the Creator.

The Example of Al-Ghafur: The Forgiving

I would like to give you one example. I suppose I could give many and since there are 99 famous names of God it would take us quite a long time to go through them all but I'd like to give one example of the forgiving, which by the way also neatly ties in with what I'm talking about the whole topic today.

The Prophet Muhammad, may God's peace and blessings be upon him, said something, it is a really extraordinary thing that he said, it's really something very deep. He said that if you did not sin and then ask God for forgiveness for your sins then God would remove you and he would bring another people who did sin and they would ask God forgiveness for their sins and then God would forgive them. And what is deep about this and it is not an invitation for human beings to sin but it is an explanation of the reality, number one that human beings will sin but number two and importantly is through recognizing that you have done something in opposition to what God has commanded and through your knowing that God is displeased with that but you also know that you have a Lord who is forgiving and who is merciful and who accepts repentance and so through this process of recognizing your sin, repenting for your sin, you understand the reality of Allah, the forgiving.

How else could you understand the reality that God is a forgiving God if you did not sin and then seek forgiveness for your sins? How will you comprehend the reality of it? So therefore these things are inevitable, they must be part of our life, through them and by them we come to realize and we come to understand all of this suffering, the existence of evil, all of these things, that is part of this tapestry of life through which and by which we can realize and understand truth.

Point Three: Life Is a Test

Point number three I want to make is that life is a test. The Quran says in Surah Al-Mulk : (الَّذِي خَلَقَ الْمَوْتَ وَالْحَيَاةَ لِيَبْلُوَكُمْ أَيُّكُمْ أَحْسَنُ عَمَلًا ۚ وَهُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الْغَفُورُ - alladhi khalaqa al-mawta wa al-hayata liyabluwakum ayyukum ahsanu ‘amalan wa huwa al-‘azizu al-ghafur) which means that God has created death and life to test you as to which of you is the best in conduct and he is the Mighty, the Forgiving. (Quran 67:2)

This is a huge topic in and of itself but life is a test to make known which of us will obey and which of us will disobey, which of us will follow God's guidance and which of us will turn away from God's guidance. It also implies that life is a struggle, life is a struggle, struggle is built into life. Mankind has been created in toil and struggle yet it is through that toil and through that struggle and through that whole process of facing difficulties and challenges that we become either better human beings or in fact we become worse human beings.

The Relativity of Evil: The Earthquake Example

And this by the way illustrates the important point of how relative the concept of evil is because if we take the example of an earthquake, let's say right now in here there was an earthquake and this building fell down, for some people this may be a great calamity, it may be the end of their life, they may become disabled, many terrible things, their friends may die, they may lose all hope of life, yet there are other people in this room who almost certainly will rise to the challenge of the occasion, that they will display acts of bravery and courage and selflessness and altruism. There will even be those people who suffer loss but through it and through overcoming that loss they become better human beings and this is the reality.

In fact this is the reality of our everyday life. In fact even at university you're suffering aren't you? Every time you have to read those medical books and remember those Latin names. And we realize that through embracing this struggle, the word which means in Arabic by the way jihad, jihad means in Arabic to struggle to the utmost of your capacity, it could be an internal thing within yourself struggling against your desires or it could be external struggling with the evils of the world around you, but if you embrace that struggle right then you will truly experience the ultimate form of happiness and contentment and satisfaction. This is what elevates you as a human being.

Point Four: Evil as a Consequence of Human Actions

Fourthly and this is amazing if you can put these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together, people may be thinking okay well God has created this world and in this world is suffering and there are disasters and there are so many things that happen and I can understand why that's important for us as human beings to benefit in this way, but why does God let people suffer and so on and so forth? Well actually the Quran tells us and I just want to read the translation unfortunately, okay it's okay I've got it here, I just want to read the translation of some verses of the Quran in Surah Ar-Rum, which is the 30th surah, verses 40 to 42.

It is God who - (اللَّهُ الَّذِي خَلَقَكُمْ ثُمَّ رَزَقَكُمْ ثُمَّ يُمِيتُكُمْ ثُمَّ يُحْيِيكُمْ ۖ هَلْ مِن شُرَكَائِكُم مَّن يَفْعَلُ مِن ذَٰلِكُم مِّن شَيْءٍ سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ عَمَّا يُشْرِكُونَ - allahu alladhi khalaqakum thumma razaqakum thumma yumitukum thumma yuhyikum hal min shuraka'ikum man yaf'alu min dhalikum min shai'in subhanahu wa ta'ala 'amma yushrikun) created you and provided for you, who will cause you to die and then give you life again, which of your partners can do any of these things? Glory be to God and exalted be he above the partners they attribute to him. (Quran 30:40)

Corruption has flourished on land and - (ظَهَرَ الْفَسَادُ فِي الْبَرِّ وَالْبَحْرِ بِمَا كَسَبَتْ أَيْدِي النَّاسِ لِيُذِيقَهُم بَعْضَ الَّذِي عَمِلُوا لَعَلَّهُمْ يَرْجِعُونَ - zahara al-fasadu fi al-barri wa al-bahri bima kasabat aydi al-nasi liyudhiqahum ba'da alladhi 'amilu la'allahum yarji'un) sea as a result of people's actions and he will make them taste the consequence of some of their own actions so they may turn back. (Quran 30:41)

(قُلْ سِيرُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ فَانظُرُوا كَيْفَ كَانَ عَاقِبَةُ الَّذِينَ مِن قَبْلُ كَانَ أَكْثَرُهُم مُّشْرِكِينَ - qul siru fi al-ardi fanzuru kayfa kana 'aqibatu alladhina min qablu kana aktharuhum mushrikin) - Say travel through the land and see how those before you met their end, most of them were people who set up partners with God. (Quran 30:42)

So even corruption has appeared on the land, on the face of the land and sea because of what we have done, evil is a product of our own hands, it's because of the evil actions of human beings. We don't attribute therefore evil

to God. Life is a test but we have created that scenario for ourselves through our own evil actions. When I say created I mean we have brought about that through our evil actions so we suffer also similarly because of our actions but the reason again is so that we will repent, that we will turn back, that we will reform ourselves, that we will change ourselves, that we will try to improve ourselves. So this is another important factor.

Point Five: The Path to Paradise and Hellfire

And finally the last thing and this connects with my first perspective that I wanted to make. When God created the paradise and the hellfire he said to the angel Gabriel, O Gabriel go and look at my paradise and tell me what you think. So Gabriel came back, he said O Allah anyone who comes to hear of this place they will definitely enter into it. And then God surrounded the paradise with difficulties and hardships and tests and trials and then he said to the angel Gabriel, now go and look at my paradise and tell me what you think. And he said I am afraid that nobody will enter it.

And he created the hellfire, he said O Gabriel look at my hellfire, tell me what you think. He said anyone who comes to hear of this place they will never go there. Then he surrounded that hellfire with luxury and ease and comfort and then he said now Gabriel go and tell me what you think. And he came back and he said I'm afraid nobody will escape it.

This is the reality. The path to paradise, the destination is a beautiful one but the way there is a path of sacrifice, of commitment, of difficulties and hardships but the ultimate end is worth it all. Similarly the hellfire is surrounded by comfort, luxury but its ultimate destination is a horrific one.

The Argument Between Paradise and Hellfire

Finally one connected thing I want to mention, it's extraordinary that the Prophet mentioned that the paradise and the hellfire argued with each other, they argued with each other and this by the way may seem strange but is to illustrate the perfect justice of God. The paradise and the hellfire argued, the hellfire said in me are the arrogant, the rich and the proud, and the paradise said in me are the poor and the displaced and the weak and the humble. So God intervened between this argument, he said to the hellfire you are my punishment and you will be filled and he said to the paradise you are my mercy and you will be filled.

The reality is brothers and sisters that we are either fuel for the fire or we are the people of paradise. It is from God's justice that he created hellfire and there will be people who will go there, he has created people for that hellfire, it is like a living being that wants to consume and God in his justice will feed it. And God has created paradise and he will put people in the paradise but the people who go to hell they go there because they chose to do that, they chose to live their life, they chose to disobey God, they chose to take that path that will lead them there. God did not force them, they chose it.

And the people of paradise, well in reality we would say that nobody deserves paradise, there is nothing we can do really to deserve paradise. People go to paradise from the grace of God, from his grace and mercy but there

are things that a person does, a way that a person behaves and actions a person does in one's life and that is something that God loves from a human being and due to that love for them and their actions and their beliefs that he will enter them in his mercy to the paradise.

A Personal Story: Witnessing Childbirth

You know I gave a lot of rational reasons but I just wanted to give you one final thing to think about and it's to do with suffering. Masha'Allah, alhamdulillah, through the mercy of Allah I'm the father of 11 children. I've been to the birth of every single one of my children except this one sitting right here, Hamza, he's the only one. Maybe that's why I don't know but anyway maybe that's why he's so good-looking, you didn't see my face and go ah, you know, seriously but jokes aside.

My second youngest child, her name is Ayat, I want to tell you how she got her name. As it happened my wife was very weak when she went into labor, she went into labor brothers and sisters on the night of Eid and it was a really hard labor and I don't think you know, labor I find a really stressful thing just to watch it, so what is it gonna be like for the person who's going through it? But this particular labor brothers and sisters was very intense and you know it really, things started to come to my head, why, why does she have to suffer like that, why does she have to go through all this pain, why, what's it all for?

And as I'm watching my wife in that pain and that suffering and then eventually the baby is born and the nurse takes the baby and cleans it and puts her in the incubator, whatever the little warm thing they keep the baby warm in, and my wife is in shock, she shakes after the thing, she's in this aftershock, she's shaking from the aftershock and she looks over and I pick up the baby and I give her the baby and she looks at it and she says oh my baby what would mummy do without you?

I mean you want a miracle? You want something incredible? After all that pain, after all that suffering and she says oh my baby what would mummy do without you? All that love from that pain and from that suffering. I think that's a sign for people who think, for people who reflect.

Closing

My brothers and sisters everyone here tonight, it's been a real pleasure, may Allah bless you all. As-salamu alaykum.