A reminder of the inevitable event of death and what happens shortly after in our graves. According to hadith, two angels ask us about our deen, our Lord and our Prophet (P). But while many of us know the answers, many of us won’t answer these questions correctly! Find out why in this powerful video.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
When we die, our soul departs from our body, and the soul goes on a journey that has many stages to it. For the beginning of this, I want to focus on one stage of the journey of this soul, and that is when the soul descends into the grave to be reunited with our bodies.
When the soul is coming down, it witnesses the janazah. Your body is laying there on the ground, wrapped up, getting ready to be buried, and you’re descending and you’re seeing this and you’re hearing it, you’re experiencing it. And when the people then take your body and place it in the grave, your soul descends in there into the grave to be reunited with your body. And then your loved ones, your friends, who were there at your janazah, they will start shoveling dirt, start picking up dirt with their hands, and placing it in the grave, throwing it on top of you, and you will feel it fall on top of you. And they will do this until you are completely covered up, and you will be there in the grave covered up and you will have consciousness. You will be alive, not physically obviously, but your soul will experience this.
Then, after your family makes some duas and they say some nice, kind words about you, they’ll walk away, they’ll leave, and you will hear their footsteps, as the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, that you will hear their footsteps as they walk away. And you will be there alone in the grave: darkness, silence.
What happens at that point? Two angels come to you, Munkar and Nakir, and they ask you three questions, perhaps the most important questions you will ever be asked, and the three most important questions you will ever answer. And those questions are: What is your deen (translated as, what is your way of life or your religion)? Who is your prophet? And who is your lord? Not necessarily in that order, but those are the three questions.
If you answer these questions correctly—all three of them—your stay in the grave will be one of peace. You’ll have peace, you’ll have pleasure, until the Day of Judgment when the horn is sounded and you are raised up out of your grave. So during that time, if you answer these questions correctly, you will have peace. But if you don’t answer these questions correctly—all three of them—your stay in the grave will be full of pain. So we must answer these questions correctly.
But here’s the problem: a lot of us say to ourselves at this point, “I’m good, ’cause I’m a Muslim and I know the answers to these questions and I’ll answer them correctly.” This is a problem; this is called being overconfident, because the answers are not given, as many of the scholars say, the answer is not given with your tongue. The answer is not given with your brain. The answer is given with your heart. What is in your heart will come out at that moment. And so, if you lived your life—no matter how long your life was—if you lived your life not praying, not striving to implement Islam, not striving to understand the Qur’an to the best of your ability, if you spent your life not really striving to be a Muslim, a true Muslim, trying to practice, then Islam really was not in your heart. So we have to make sure that we’re striving, again, to the best of our ability. I’m not asking for perfection, I’m not asking for scholars, I’m not asking for you to be of the best character like the Prophet, peace be upon him, but we must strive for it so that on that day, when these angels come to us and they ask us these questions, what is in our heart will naturally come forward. The answers, the correct answers, will come forth, and not the answers of “I was striving for something other than the pleasure of Allah.” So we have to make sure that Islam is in our hearts, not just on our lips, not just in our mind.