The relativity of time is such that a period appearing to us to be billions of years in duration may last only a second in another perspective. This is the very essence of the concept of destiny. Destiny is God’s perfect knowledge of all events past and future.
A majority of people question how God can already know events that have not yet transpired or been “experienced”. However, “events not yet experienced” are so only for us. God is not bound by time and space, for He himself has created them. For this reason, past, present and future are all the same for God; for Him everything has already taken place.
According to Barnett, the universe can be “encompassed in its entire majesty only by a cosmic intellect”. The will that Barnett calls “the cosmic intellect” is the wisdom and knowledge of God, who prevails over the entire universe. Just as we can easily see a measuring ruler’s beginning, middle and end, and all the units in between as a whole, God knows the time we are subject to as if it were a single ruler right from its beginning to its end. People, however, experience incidents only, when their time comes.
In the Qur’an, 35:11, it is stated that all things happen as a matter of destiny. For instance, people make superficial statements about a patient who returns from death’s door, such as “he defeated his destiny”. No one is able to change his destiny. The person who returned from death’s door didn’t die precisely because he was destined not to die at that time.
Some incidents that appear to us as about to happen in the future are related in the Qur’an as if they had already taken place long before. For instance, the verses that describe the accounts that people must give to God in the hereafter are related as events which occurred long ago:
“And the trumpet is blown, and all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth swoon away, save him whom God wills. Then it is blown a second time, and behold them standing waiting! And the earth shone with the light of her lord, and the Book is set up, and the prophets and the witnesses are brought, and it us judged between them with truth, and they are not wronged… And those who disbelieve are driven into hell in troops… And those who feared their lord are driven into paradise in troops… (Qur’an 39:68-73)”
Also, the events that are going to take place after our death are related in the Qur’an as past events already experienced. God is not bound by the relative time frame in which we are confined. God has willed these things in timelessness: people have already performed them and all these events have been lived through and are ended.
With this secret out, the world becomes like heaven for a believer. All distressful material worries, anxieties and fears vanish. He grasps that the entire universe has a single sovereign, who changes the entire physical world as He pleases and that all one has to do is to turn to Him. He then submits himself entirely to God “to be devoted to His service (Qur’an 3:35)”.
To comprehend this secret is the greatest gain in the world.

The writer is a master’s student of Zoology at CUK. [email protected]

Saadat Tansur