Why This Heedlessness of Death?

Why This Heedlessness of Death? of information about him, including about how he will look, how he will speak, how he will smile, and so on. All this information is contained in the form of ‘chemical letters’. It is said that this information relates to some 3 billion different subjects about a person’s life! A person’s genetic code, it is claimed, contains so much information that if it is decoded and written out, it would require several hundred volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica! But strangely, despite this information of encyclopaedic proportions being contained in the genetic code of a single person, this code contains no information about when, how and where he will die. Why is this so? The reason is that God has made death a matter of conscious discovery for an individual. A person should come out of his programming and think about the fact of his death, and, in the light of this, plan his life. There is a similarity between sleep and death. This is expressed in the words of a hadith of the Prophet: “Sleep is the sister of death.” (Shu‘ab al-Iman 4416) When someone goes to sleep, he becomes unconscious and oblivious to his surroundings. Similarly, death appears to make a person unconscious. But there is a basic difference between sleep and death. People generally have some sort of fixed sleeping hours, or at least are aware when they retire to bed to go to sleep. But with regard to death, no one knows at all when it might come. Death suddenly arrives, without anyone’s knowledge. Someone dies in infancy or in the prime of youth. Someone else dies at a ripe old age. This fundamental difference between sleep and death conveys to us a profound truth. And that is, that while sleep is a part of the natural programming of a person, death is not so. When death arrives, it does so as a direct decision of God. It is God who decides when a person shall die. When someone dies, it does not mean the end of his life. The fact is that despite his bodily death he is still alive and is present at a different place. Thus, death is actually a transfer.