Answer
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu waRahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
- No comparison between the pleasure of this life and the pleasure of Paradise.
- We should get ourselves busy on how to get to Paradise.
- Matter of heaven and hell belong to the realm of Ghayb (Unseen).
Responding to your question, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer and an Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, states:
You are making the mistake of measuring the experience of Paradise with the experiences of this mundane and transient world. There is no comparison: How can it be when the former is incomparable and untainted bliss while the latter is pleasure tainted with pain, sorrow, and imperfection?
So, if we still try to compare the two, we are not different from that of an infant in the womb trying to think of his experience as a measurement to imagine what awaits him outside the womb. It is wholly absurd and irrational.
Furthermore, matters of heaven and hell belong to the realm of ghayb (Unseen), and as such, it lies beyond human cognition and rational thinking. So, we must accept it as stated in the revelation: “In the heaven is such bliss the like of which no eyes have seen, no ears have heard about, and no mind could ever conceive!.” (Al-Bukhari)
So rest assured, if we get there, we shall experience such utmost bliss beyond which all other experiences pale into insignificance.
Therefore, instead of raising such questions, we may do well to focus on how to get to Paradise in the first place.
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I pray to Allah to honor us all to live as Muslims, die in a state of faith, and gather us all in the company of the righteous. Amen.
Allah Almighty knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.