Page 27 - Why Do You Deceive Yourself ?

Being Sincerely Religious without Deceiving Yourself 25
from a position of ignorance of the religion, you will fall into errors
from which there is no recovery. Do not forget that you will only find
salvation when you believe in Allah with a firm faith and serve Him
sincerely. This truth is also stated by our Prophet (saas) thus:
Whoever meets Allah, without associating partners with Him, will enter
Paradise. (Sahih Muslim)

Faith in the Hereafter
As we have pointed out in previous chapters, a person who
spends his life pursuing his own desires and passions, doing worth-
less deeds and failing to recognize the instructions and prohibitions of

Allah does not want to consider that in the Hereafter he will be resur-
rected, called to account for everything he has done and treated ac-
cordingly. Because of this, no matter how much his conscience is
aware of the existence of the Hereafter, he prefers to suppress his con-
science and deceives himself. This is, for example, one of the reasons
people adopt the belief in reincarnation which has become wide-
spread in recent times and according to which people return to the
world after death many times, in different places, at different times
and with different identities. This is because people who know that in
the Hereafter the punishment of Hell awaits them for what they have
done, or who at least grant the possibility of this, are made uncomfort-
able by the fact that on dying they will enter the Hereafter. As a result
they joyfully accept such perverted beliefs or ideas, which are com-
pletely outside of the truth, even though they are not supported by the
slightest evidence.
People who seek to deceive themselves in this way by making
themselves believe that there is no Hereafter have existed in every pe-
riod of history. Indeed, in the Qur'an Allah warns us about the way