Page 281 - For Men of Understanding

Destiny
Time's variable relativity reveals a very important reality: A period of time
of apparently billions of years' duration to us, may last only a second in anoth-
er dimension. Moreover, an enormous period of time-from the world's begin-
ning to its end-may not last even a second, but just an instant in another dimen-
sion.
This is the very essence of destiny's reality-one that is not well understood
by most people, especially materialists, who deny it completely. Destiny is
Allah's perfect knowledge of all events, past or future. Many, if not most, ques-
tion how Allah can already know events that have not yet been experienced,
and this leads them to fail to understand the authenticity of destiny. However,
events not yet experienced are not yet experienced by us only. Allah is not
bound by time or space, for He Himself has created them. For this reason, the
past, the future, and the present are all the same to Allah; for Him, everything
has already taken place and is finished.
In The Universe and Dr. Einstein, Lincoln Barnett explains how the Theory
of General Relativity leads to this insight. According to him, the universe can
be "encompassed in its entire majesty only by a cosmic intellect." 21 What Barnett
calls "the cosmic intellect" is the wisdom and knowledge of Allah, Who prevails
over the entire universe. Just as we easily see the beginning, middle, and end
of a ruler and all the units in between as a whole, so Allah knows the time to
which we're subjected right from its beginning to the end, like a single
moment. People experience incidents only when their time comes for them to
witness the fate Allah has created for them.
It is also important to consider society's distorted understanding of destiny.
This distorted conviction presents the superstitious belief that Allah has deter-
mined a "destiny" for every man, but sometimes that people can change these
destinies. For instance, speaking of a patient who's returned from death's door,
people make superficial statements like, "He defeated his destiny." Yet no one
is able to change his destiny. The person who turns from death's door is des-
tined not to die then. Again, it's the destiny of those people to deceive them-
selves by saying, "I defeated my destiny" and maintain such a mindset.
Destiny is the eternal knowledge of Allah. And for Allah, Who knows the
whole time as a single moment and Who prevails over the whole time and
space, everything is determined and finished in its destiny.
We also understand from what is related in the Qur'an that time is one for
Allah: some incidents that appear to happen to us in the future are related in
the Qur'an in such a way that they already took place long before. For instance,
the verses that describe the account that people are to give to Allah in the here-
after are related as events which already occurred long ago:

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