Questioner: Another aspect about the soul, you throw some more light on the question of the mortality of the soul. Can it be said that the soul is mortal?
Huzoor (rh): Well the soul, everything is mortal in the sense that by itself nothing can continue to live. So only Allah keeps things, you know, remain as they are or move forward if he so pleases. So the soul also is no exception to that general rule. But the word soul will have to be defined. Before I begin to answer your question because some people believe that animal life below human level also possesses souls.
So if you expand the meaning of soul then I would say, in answer to your question, that all souls do not continue to live. There are souls which may perish and that is perhaps, I believe, those animal souls which are below the level of human beings or to be more accurate I should say, below that level where Allah has not contacted that being. That Allah has not come into communion with that being. As far as we know nothing below man is in communion with Allah in the sense that there is a two-way flow of dialogue of things.
In that sense we can say with some certainty that man was the first animal which had reached a stage of evolution where he was capable of receiving Allah’s wahi and speaking to him consciously and directly. So a two-way dialogue was possible. At that stage we know the soul comes into an independent existence.
It’s no longer dependent on body. It can sever the ties with body yet survive. For how long? That will again be decided by Allah. But I believe that they would be moving from one stage to another continuously because Allah is Rabbul Alameen and from that I infer that Allah is capable and in fact really does this. That he takes a thing in a state and under the influence of God it begins to rise to a higher stage and so on and so forth.
So the souls would also continue to rise in their refinement, in their closeness to God, in other developments of which we cannot conceive. But there would be some developments. So that seems to be an eternal journey. But they would not yet be called eternal because according to our definition the word eternity would not apply to them. Man is not eternal, is he? Yet he lives beyond death. So what is death? A transformation of a state.
So if there are stages of transformation there would be many deaths. If there is a violent transformation that is what we call death. So in that sense if the soul is to continue to rise further to higher levels of existence then it perhaps would pass through same barriers where it would stop for a while and hesitate and then jump to the higher order and that would be the death for that state of the soul and it’s being reborn into a different state.
If that is my vision of what may happen because of certain verses of the Holy Quran which I interpret this way and you know this is also my general intuition that this should be. If that is true then as you wanted to find out the souls could be in a way eternal that is to say they will not die and in another way they will not be eternal because they will continue in stages to change form. If you look at hell and heaven in the light of this then perhaps there is more reason to be certain that this is exactly what it should be because heaven is described by the Holy Quran to be continuous, never ending.
Now it is possible that an abode of good people is never ending but the good people end there. This is possible. But the way it is described the eternity of heaven is described in relation to the occupants. It is not just described independently of the occupants to be eternal. What is described is eternal heaven for certain people. So if they are not eternal how could their heaven be eternal? So from that we can draw almost a certain conclusion that souls would attain some sort of eternity.
