Al-Risala (English), January-February 2000

right down to the humblest insect are born and provided for every day. How is it then that such a great multiplicity of events—all of them extremely complex—can take place contemporaneously? The Prophets in their wisdom have taught that this is all part of a divine order which the Almighty controls through invisible angels acting as His intermediaries. It is they who carry out His commandments and communicate His word to the prophets. They preserve a record of man’s actions by means of which God decides which individuals and which nations shall be rewarded or punished. It is the angels who take possession of the human soul at the moment of death, and it is they who will sound the last trumpet which shall throw the whole universe into disarray. It is then that the righteous shall dwell forever in Paradise, while the sinful shall be cast down into hell-fire and eternal damnation. □ Social Development R eligion has a great role to play in social development. But this role is not that of providing a scheme of social development in the structural sense. It is rather a matter of developing individuals, the units of society, as a result of which the whole of society becomes developed. Thus the role of religions is to develop the individuals directly, as a result of which, society is indirectly developed. It would be true to say that man by nature is a developmentseeking animal. By the urge of his own nature, the human being wants to make progress. The barrier to progress is not the absence of any external system; it is, in fact, anti-social thinking