By: Nawaz

Private relationship between man and his Creator is essentially founded on the idea of salvation. Salvation is common to all religions, even to Buddhism which does not acknowledge the existence of God.The idea of salvation was born out of the belief that man's sojourn on earth was one of bondage. How to extricate himself from that bondage thus became the main object of his life. Islam on the other hand, is neither such a relationship between man and God, nor is it characterized by the experience of an individual of a subjective nature, but is essentially a "Code of Life," regulating the conduct of affairs concerning the individual as well as the collective life of human beings. Secondly, it does not consider man’s life on earth a period of bondage in. which case the .idea of salvation does not arise. On the contrary, having assigned to man a very high position in the universe, Islam expects him to take up the challenge of life boldly in order to harness the forces of nature for the development of his own self and the larger community of mankind. The fallacy of considering Islam a religion springs from the fact that absolute "faith" in God is of fundamental importance to it, as it is supposed to be more or less so in all religions, past and present, but it is not only the " faith" in God that should serve as a criterion in arriving at a correct estimate of one or the other. The real question we should be concerned with is, what is the concept of God which is supposed to be the common factor? Another basic point of distinction between the Material concept of life and that of Islam is that, while in the former the life of a human being is circumscribed by and limited merely to man’s physical existence in this world and is disintegrated and gets extinct with death, in the latter, the human body develops, flourishes, and eventually disintegrates under physical laws but there is something else in man besides his body, that is his Self or Personality, which is neither physical in its constitution nor is it subject to the physical laws as such. It is endowed to every human child in like measure at his but it is only in an undeveloped form. To develop it to its full maturity and to give a perfect and balanced shape is the goal of all human exertions. Every act of his performed in full compliance with the Permanent Values contributes to its development and whatever is done against these values retards this process and weakens the self. An act includes the thought and intent as well. The Self or Personality, thus developed is easily sustains the shock of death and survives the disintegration and dissolution of the physical entity and goes on developing further, passing through more evolutionary stages. This we call the "Hereafter" or the "life after death".

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