Posted on: 1999

By Khaled Nusseibeh

Eternity may be understood through many avenues and at many levels. The primary avenue of understanding it is the permanence of life after death and resurrection; by extension, the ephemeral, temporary moment of life is an obvious fact.

The temporary nature of life is oftentimes difficult to accept. The unwise have challenged life’s fading moment through celebrating only this life, and through suppressing its underlying meaning and reality.

Many in life’s history have appreciated life with its joyous occasions– success, birth, health, material well-being, and betrothal. Those have lived their earthly moment– but have also struggled to remind themselves of life’s fading moment, in addition to their yearning for the abode of paradise and for liberation from hellfire.

According to Islam, the road to salvation has, since the dawn of human habitation on earth, been doctrinally and ethically identical: surrender to the One God our Creator, to his messengers, belief in the hereafter, and performance of righteous deeds and avoidance of corruption.

The Unity of God– and his exclusive entitlement to be worshipped– has been a belief communicated through God’s Covenant with our collective ancestor Adam, and his descendants, and through divine revelations to the peoples and tribes of mankind: e.g. the Torah, the Evangel and the Holy Koran, revealed to Moses, Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad respectively. (Peace be upon them).

It is no secret that many, in human history, until present times, have not been believers. There are common threads in the phenomenon of unbelief too many to enumerate here: but one of them is a denial of the significance of life’s temporary moment, coupled with an irrational denial of God’s Capability to resurrect the dead on the Day of Judgement. That the denial of the possibility of resurrection is an irrationality is because it limits– through an intellectual fiction– God’s Attribute of Omnipotence (i.e. that God is Almighty and that he is Capable of all things). It is an irrationality, moreover, because all of us can witness the miracle of life in the birth of each baby, in the growth of each tree…; and yet, through observing the seemingly ordinary birth of life many exclude the possibility that the God who created life in the first place is capable of creating the same life again. To deny this is to express a limited observation of life as occurring once. But to say that life occurs once is simply false: the proofs of Revelation and reason support this.

The argument may be made, furthermore, that one of the primary sources of human folly and oppression is denial of resurrection and Divine accounting, over and above clinging to the illusion of permanence in this life; sometimes, this has been the folly of individuals– at others, it has been the folly of elites of empires, ruling dynasties, fiefdoms– and, also, the folly of very modern secular states (e.g. Communist, Nazi or liberal states). Hitler believed that Berlin would be the Third Reich’s capital for 1,000 years; Communists were convinced that Socialism is where the direction of history is; the liberal intellectual Fukuyama claimed that liberalism is the final ideological and political event of human history.

Jerusalem very much embodies the notion of the heavenly kingdom and life after death; and yet, it has been characterized by some Zionist politicians as “Israel’s” eternal capital. It is, sometimes more appropriate to withhold comment when claims to political eternity are made! History’s simplest lessons would have to be ignored in the process.

Human vision is maintained– and the moral content of political conduct is enhanced– when people have the ability to affirm life’s and power’s temporary moment. To affirm God’s unchanging reality and to believe in the hereafter is critically important in the human quest to avoid what is painful or disastrous. To learn, to build, to struggle, to toil are facts of life: to do so with faith, with a commitment to justice, and with an awareness of God’s purpose in life is to avoid rolling the dice of uncertainty and self inflicted injury. Truly Allah is All-Merciful and absolutely just.

Mr. Khaled Nusseibeh is a translator and writer. He currently manages the Ubada Center for Writing and Translation Services in Amman. Born in Amman in 1961, he obtained his BA and MA from Columbia and Princeton Universities, respectively. Mr. Nusseibeh, who originates from Jerusalem, specialized in Near Eastern Studies with a focus on Islamic thought and studies.