The Essence of Islam – Volume II — Page 397
The Soul 397 the body. But the Holy Qur'an indicates that the souls of the righteous are revived within a short period-some after three days, some after a week, and some after forty days after death and are bestowed a second life of comfort and ease and delight. That is the life for the achievement of which the righteous servants of God approach Him with the utmost sincerity and put forth all their effort in order to emerge from the darkness of their egos and adopt a hard mode of life in the search of God's pleasure, so much so that this condition resembles death. . As the verse cited above indicates, there is a death for the soul as there is for the body, though the hidden circumstances of that state do not become manifest in this dark world. Yet the state of dreams is an illustration of that state which resembles the state of death of the soul in this world. It is our experience that as soon as we sink into sleep all the qualities of our soul are upset and we forget our waking hours and our spiritual qualities, and all the knowledge that our soul possesses becomes non-existent. . We experience such scenes in our dreams as show that our soul has lost all the qualities that it possessed in wakefulness and has become something very different. . This condition resembles death and is indeed a sort of death. This shows conclusively that the death which is imposed upon the soul with the death of the body resembles the death which the soul experiences in sleep but is very much heavier. [Chashma-e-Ma'rifat, Rūḥānī Khazā'in, vol. 23, pp. 160-164]. The doctrine which the Qur'ān teaches is that as God has created the soul He also has power to make it nonexistent, and that the human soul is bestowed immortality by the bounty and grace of God, and not on account of any inherent quality of its own. That is why those who