Loading...
Loading...
Chapter 3 of 511 min read
الإنسان في الإسلام: الخلق والغاية والمحاسبة
Who is the human being? This is not a trivial question. The answer shapes everything: how human beings should be treated, what they can legitimately aspire to, what obligations they bear, what happens to them when they die, and what kind of society deserves to be built for them. Different answers produce radically different civilizational projects. The Islamic answer — precise, comprehensive, and grounded in divine revelation — is the subject of this chapter.
Ja'far Sheikh Idris was particularly attentive to what he called the Islamic anthropology — the Islamic account of what human beings are — because he recognized that this anthropology is foundational to everything else. The arguments for Islam's comprehensiveness, for the necessity of divine guidance, for the intelligibility of moral obligation, and for the purpose of human existence all depend on this foundation. And the contrast between Islamic anthropology and secular humanist anthropology is sharp enough that the choice between them has profound practical consequences.
The Islamic account of human creation begins with divine intentionality. Human beings were not produced by a random, purposeless process of natural selection operating on cosmic accident. They were created by Allah with deliberate design for a specific purpose. The Quran describes Allah's direct creative act: "And when your Lord said to the angels, 'Indeed, I will make upon the earth a khalifah (steward/vicegerent)'" (2:30). This is a deliberate announcement — a statement of divine purpose before the act of creation — establishing from the outset that human beings have a defined role in the cosmic order.
The creation of Adam is described in the Quran with significant detail. He was formed from clay, from the earth: "He created man from sounding clay like that of pottery" (55:14). But what makes human beings distinctive is not their material composition but what was added to it: "And when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, then fall down to him in prostration" (15:29). The divine breath (nafkh ar-ruh) that was breathed into Adam is what distinguishes the human being from all other created beings, including the animals whose material nature humans share. This divine breath — the soul (ruh) — is the source of human dignity, moral capacity, rational intelligence, and spiritual longing.
The significance of this account for human dignity cannot be overstated. Every human being — regardless of race, gender, social class, intelligence, or capacity — possesses this dignity because every human being carries the ruh that Allah breathed into Adam. Human dignity, on the Islamic account, is not a philosophical construct, not a social consensus, not a biological characteristic — it is a divine bestowal. It cannot be earned and cannot be taken away. Even the criminal, even the oppressor, even the person who has profoundly failed his human potential retains a dignity that comes from Allah's creative act, and this dignity places constraints on how even such a person may be treated.
Islam affirms that every human being comes into the world with a fitrah — a natural disposition or constitution — that inclines toward recognition of Allah, toward moral good, and toward what is right and true. The Quran records the primordial covenant (mithaq) through which Allah took the testimony of all human souls before their embodied existence: "And when your Lord took from the children of Adam — from their loins — their descendants and made them testify of themselves, saying to them, 'Am I not your Lord?' They said, 'Yes, we have testified'" (7:172). Every human soul has already testified to Allah's lordship before entering this world. The fitrah carries the echo of this testimony.
The hadith is explicit: "Every child is born upon the fitrah; then his parents turn him into a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian" (Bukhari and Muslim). This does not mean every child is born a Muslim in the religious-legal sense. It means every child is born with a natural constitution oriented toward the truth — toward recognizing Allah, toward the moral intuitions that Islam affirms. The distorting influences come later, from upbringing, environment, and the accretion of hawa (desires) that obscure the fitrah's natural testimony.
The concept of fitrah is philosophically significant in several ways. It grounds the universal accessibility of certain moral truths — it explains why cultures across history have convergent moral intuitions about murder, theft, and lying being wrong, even without prophetic revelation. It grounds the intelligibility of the Islamic message to all human beings — the Quran appeals to fitrah repeatedly, inviting people to examine what their own uncorrupted nature recognizes as true. And it grounds the accountability of human beings who have not received explicit prophetic revelation — since even they have access to the testimony of their own fitrah, they are not left entirely without guidance.
The purpose of human existence is stated with exceptional clarity in the Quran: "And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me ('ibadah)" (51:56). This verse is often quoted, and its meaning is often misunderstood. 'Ibadah in this context does not mean ritual worship exclusively — the five daily prayers, the annual fast, and the other specific acts of worship prescribed in Islam. It means comprehensive service of Allah — living in a way that is entirely oriented toward pleasing Him, in every domain of life and every moment of existence.
Ibn Kathir, the great Quranic commentator, explains that the meaning of 'ibadah in this verse encompasses obedience to Allah, submission to His will, and the orientation of one's entire existence toward His pleasure. Every act of a Muslim — work, family life, eating, sleeping, social interaction — becomes ibadah when performed with the intention of pleasing Allah and in accordance with His guidance. The comprehensive scope of 'ibadah is what makes Islam's comprehensiveness both possible and necessary: if every dimension of human life is potentially worship, then divine guidance for every dimension of human life is required.
The concept of khalifah — stewardship or vicegerency — complements and deepens the concept of 'ibadah. Human beings are not merely servants of Allah in a passive sense; they are His representatives on earth, entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining His creation in accordance with His will. The earth is not ours to exploit — it is a trust (amanah) given to us, and we are accountable to the Trustor for how we manage it. This concept has profound implications for environmental ethics, for the treatment of other species, and for the obligations of those in positions of power and authority.
Islam holds a carefully balanced position on human freedom. Human beings are genuine agents — they make real choices that are genuinely their own and for which they are genuinely accountable. This is not qualified or diminished by divine omniscience and divine omnipotence. Allah knows what choices human beings will make before they make them, and His permission encompasses every event that occurs — but this foreknowledge and permission do not make human choices unfree. The classical theologians of Islam devoted enormous intellectual energy to articulating how genuine human freedom and genuine divine sovereignty can coexist, and different schools reached different formulations. But all Islamic schools agreed on the practical conclusion: human beings choose, and they are accountable for their choices.
The Quran affirms human freedom unambiguously: "And say, 'The truth is from your Lord, so whoever wills — let him believe; and whoever wills — let him disbelieve'" (18:29). "Whoever does an atom's weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom's weight of evil will see it" (99:7-8). These verses would be unintelligible if human beings were not genuinely free — if their belief and disbelief, their good and evil actions, were not genuinely their own choices.
Accountability follows necessarily from freedom. Because human beings make real choices, they bear real responsibility for those choices. The Islamic account of moral accountability is comprehensive: every person will stand before Allah on the Day of Judgement and give an account of every deed — not just major acts of worship and major sins, but every word spoken (50:18), every intention formed, every moment of human life. "That Day, the people will depart separated in categories to be shown their deeds. So whoever does an atom's weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom's weight of evil will see it" (99:6-8).
The worldly life (dunya) is not the whole of human existence. Islam is unequivocal: human beings die, and death is followed by accountability, and accountability is followed by permanent residence in either al-Jannah (Paradise) or an-Nar (the Fire). The Quran's descriptions of both destinations are vivid, detailed, and meant to be taken seriously as descriptions of real places and real experiences, not as metaphors for psychological states or sociological conditions.
Al-Jannah is described as a place of extraordinary beauty, pleasure, peace, and — most importantly — nearness to Allah. The believers will see their Lord, and this vision will be the greatest joy of Paradise, surpassing all its other pleasures. "Faces that day will be radiant, looking at their Lord" (75:22-23). An-Nar is described as a place of terrible punishment proportionate to the deeds that earned it, where the inhabitants experience pain, regret, and the awareness of what they have lost.
The reality of the akhirah is not peripheral to Islamic ethics — it is foundational to it. Why be honest when dishonesty would benefit you in this world? Why be just when injustice would go unpunished here? Why limit your desires when immediate gratification is available? The Islamic answer to these questions is not solely "because it is intrinsically right" (though that is true) but also "because every choice is recorded and will be accounted for, and the accounting is perfect and inescapable." The person who wrongs others and escapes earthly justice has not, in fact, escaped justice — the reckoning is merely deferred to a Day when evasion is impossible.
The concept of the akhirah also provides a framework for understanding the inequities and apparent injustices of this world. Why do the righteous sometimes suffer and the wicked sometimes prosper? Because this world is not the venue of final judgment — it is the arena of testing. The Quran is explicit: "Do the people think that they will be left to say, 'We believe,' and they will not be tried?" (29:2). Suffering in this world, for the believer, is either expiation for sins or elevation of rank — it is not meaningless. Prosperity in this world, for the wrongdoer, is not vindication — it is either a gradual leading-on (istidraj) or a respite that will end.
Secular humanism — the dominant alternative anthropology in contemporary Western and Western-influenced thought — offers a strikingly different account of what human beings are and what they are for. Human beings, on the secular humanist account, are the products of a purposeless evolutionary process. They have no souls in any robust sense — their mental life is a product of brain activity, and brain activity is ultimately the product of electrochemical processes in biological tissue. They have no pre-existing nature that gives them a defined purpose — their "nature" is the flexible, socially constructed product of evolutionary biology and cultural history. They have no cosmic accountability — there is no God, no Day of Judgement, no afterlife in which the ledger is balanced. Their dignity, if they have any, is grounded in their capacity for rationality and suffering, which some humans possess more than others.
Ja'far Sheikh Idris pointed to a deep structural problem in secular humanism: it borrows the concept of human dignity from the religious tradition that grounds it — in divine creation, in the divine image, in the divine bestowal that makes every human being sacred — while rejecting the premises that ground it. Without a Creator who made human beings with intrinsic worth, what grounds the claim that human beings have dignity rather than merely having interests? The utilitarian can say that human suffering matters because humans prefer not to suffer — but this only shows that humans have preferences, not that those preferences have moral weight that obligates others to respect them. The Kantian can say that rational beings are ends in themselves — but this excludes non-rational humans (infants, the severely cognitively disabled) and potentially includes sufficiently rational non-humans, which leads to uncomfortable conclusions that Kantian ethics has struggled to address.
The Islamic account, by contrast, grounds human dignity in something more robust and more stable: the divine creative act and the divine bestowal that makes every human being, regardless of capacity, a recipient of divine dignity. This grounding is not subject to the fluctuations of philosophical fashion or the vulnerabilities of biological reduction. It stands independent of what any particular human being can do or think or feel — it is what Allah did when He created human beings and breathed His ruh into them. This is why Sheikh Idris argued that the Islamic anthropology is not merely an alternative account of human beings among several — it is the account that actually explains and grounds what human beings genuinely experience about themselves: their sense of moral obligation, their awareness of the transcendent, their longing for meaning, and their recognition that they are accountable.