The Inexplicable

Problem of Evil: A Price of Good By misusing his freedom, man has polluted the world. But there was no other way of selecting the priceless soul, worthy of entering Paradise. In a word, the call to Islam is a call to paradise. Paradise is God’s delicate and exquisite world. It will be inhabited by those who have attained to divine characteristics in their lives; those who have displayed in their worldly affairs the qualities of true humanity; those who are moved by the impact of the eternal world of God rather than by political and economic conditions. It is such people who are being selected in this world. Those who prove themselves—in both thought and deed—worthy of living in heavenly surroundings will be picked out and made to enter heaven. Others will be deprived of God’s blessings. They will be cast far away into an everlasting of darkness. Besides man, the rest of the world is incredibly beautiful. One only has to look at the luxuriant bloom of a tree and the fragile tenderness of a flower; one only has to gaze at the spectacles of nature, on land and in space; so attractive will one find them that one will not wish to remove one’s gaze. But the world of man is a cruel and polluted world. Why this difference? The reason is that in the rest of the world there is direct and total implementation of the will of God. It is exactly as God wishes it to be. But to man He has given freedom. By misusing his freedom, man has created hell on earth. In truth, God alone has power over all that is good: wherever He withholds His power there is hell and wherever He enforces it there is heaven. The question is, why did God take the risk of giving man freedom, and letting him turn God’s beautiful world into a torture-chamber by