Life Death and Beyond

death phase of life, where we had made a world of our own. And secondly, that in the phase of life after death we are not able to make a world of our own. In this world, if you lose one chance, you can get a second one. Using your second chance, you can recover your losses and succeed. But in the Hereafter, this is not possible. There, no one can get a second chance. If you have failed in proving yourself deserving of heaven in the Hereafter, you will not be able to come back to the present world for a second time in order to make amends. Burial of the Dead Once, I participated in someone’s burial. After his death, his body was washed and wrapped in a shroud made of new cloth. Then, people read the funeral prayer and, lifting the bier on their shoulders, they took it to a graveyard. There, they laid the body in a grave very respectfully. Mud was then poured on the grave. I thought to myself, “Why has Islam ordained such deference for a dead body?” It is true that after a person dies his body is nothing but a lump of mud. But despite this, it isn’t thrown away, treated like some ordinary mud. Rather, it is given the same treatment as a human being. This commandment to treat ‘mud’ like a human being is not for the sake of the deceased person, but, rather, out of consideration for the living. Through the dead person a