THE WORD OF GOD

[to God], ‘I will assuredly take a number of Your servants, and shall lead them astray, and fill them with vain desires and order them to slit the ears of cattle. I shall order them to tamper with God’s creation. Whoever chooses Satan as a patron instead of God is utterly ruined: he holds out promises to them, and fills them with vain desires: but Satan’s promises are nothing but delusion. (4 : 117-120) Hell shall be their home: they shall find no refuge from it. As for those who believe and do good works. We shall admit them to Gardens through which rivers flow; wherein they will abide forever. This is a promise from God; and whose word could be truer than God’s? (4 : 121-122) Man’s real challenge in this world is from Satan. Though Satan has no real power, he can lure human beings with fanciful promises to fulfil wishful, imaginary desires and thus manage to make them deviate from the straight path of truth. Satan’s way of misguiding is of two main types: one is superstition and the other is interference in God’s creation. Faith in superstition means expectation of such results from something as have no relation with that thing. For instance, on the basis of self-styled suppositions, one may believe that someone other than God is the controller of the affairs of the world, while it is a wellestablished fact that no one enjoys any power save God. Superstition can also take the form of being fully involved in worldly activities and then, by wishful thinking, hoping to achieve success in the Hereafter without having worked hard for it. Another way of Satan’s misleading man is by interfering in the divine scheme of things. God has created man with the innate desire to direct all his attention to God. Interfering with this involves diverting man’s attention towards things other than God or else encouraging him to acquire things by other self-devised ways and not through the natural course set by God (for instance, homosexuality). In this manner Satan interferes with man’s observance of God’s divine plan for the entire universe. It is not your desires, nor the desires of the People of the Book, that shall prevail. Anyone who commits evil will be rewarded accordingly. He will not find any protector or patron for himself besides God. Anyone who performs good deeds, whether it be a man or woman, provided that he is a believer, shall enter Paradise. No one shall suffer the least injustice. (4 : 123-124)