their ultimate fate. Every moment was to be filled with pleasurable
experience and the thought that death was round the corner,
intensified their joy in life. They lived in the present and refused to
turn their thoughts to the future which, they believed, could never
be theirs.
For the majority of men, however, the lure of immortality
remained as strong as ever. Baulked in their efforts to evade death,
they began to speculate on the ways in which life might be possible
even after death. Some of them pinned their faith on collective
survival – though they might die as individuals, yet they might
somehow continue to exist in the lives of their children and
children's children. Their earthly career might come to an end but
the career of the life they had transmitted to their children might
continue indefinitely. This belief offered them a grain of
consolation. This is one of the reasons for man's pride in his
progeny. The Qur'an refers to the joy man feels in those he has
begotten:
Beautified for mankind is love of the joys that come from wife and
children and stored up heaps of gold and silver and horses of mark
and cattle and tilth. That is comfort of the life of this earth, but Allah:
with Him is a more excellent abode (3:13).
It is obvious that this is not the immortality which is really desired
by man. What he wants is not the preservation of a portion of his
body but the continuation of his individuality. In collective survival,
the "I" has disappeared. The torch of life that a man has transmitted
to his children may be carried through generation to generation for
centuries, but the "I" that he prized most and longed to perpetuate,
vanished at the moment of his death. Man longs not for collective
survival but for the immortality of his individual self. This he
cannot claim as his right, nor can he receive it as a gift from a higher
being. Only through his personal efforts can man win immortality
for his ego. He can conquer death, but only by developing himself
to the degree at which he can stand the shock of death. As the
Qur'an says:
He has created life and death to prove you, which of you is best in
conduct (67:2).
The verse, cited above, enshrines a great truth. To grasp it fully,
we must consider it in all its aspects. Death is a natural phenomenon.
It is a physical change which overtakes the human body. The body
Islam: A Challenge to Religion 168