…up to His words:
“On the Day when the sky will be like molten metal, and the mountains like teased wool; no intimate will ask after an intimate—though they will be made to see one another—the evildoer will wish he could ransom himself from the torment of that Day with his own children….”
And His words, Exalted is He:
“So leave them to plunge and play until they meet the Day that they have been promised— the Day they will come rushing out of their graves, as if racing toward a target. Their eyes will be downcast and humiliation will overwhelm them; that is the Day they were promised.”
And His words:
“So turn away from them. On the Day the Caller summons to something terrible, they will come forth with humbled eyes from their graves as though they were scattered locusts, hurrying toward the Caller, and the disbelievers will say, ‘This is a hard Day.’”
And His words, Glorified be He:
“Then how will you safeguard yourselves, if you persist in disbelief, against a Day that will turn children gray? The sky will split apart because of it; His promise is ever fulfilled.”
And His words, Exalted is He:
“Indeed, the quake of the Hour is a momentous thing. On the Day you behold it, every nursing mother will neglect what she was nursing, every pregnant female will miscarry, and you will see people appearing drunk while they are not drunk; rather, the punishment of Allah is severe.”
Such passages are many in the Quran.
These people do not believe in the Hereafter; therefore they are not included among the Sabians whom He praised.
A clarification of some of the philosophers’ errors:
Moreover, the prophets and their followers—even the overwhelming majority of all nations—agree that Allah created the heavens and the earth, that they were brought into existence after having been nothing. The leading ancient philosophers affirmed this as well; it was only Aristotle, his faction, and those who adopted their view who claimed that the universe is eternal. How, then, can one say that the ḥikmah (wisdom) by which Allah commanded His Prophet to call people is this notion?
Furthermore, their “wisdom” has no higher goal than to discipline the soul’s morals so that it becomes ready for the knowledge they regard as its perfection. This, however, is among the least of what the messengers brought and merely one of its offshoots. The true purpose of the acts of worship enjoined by the messengers is to perfect the soul through love of Allah and through devoted worship of Him, for the soul possesses both a cognitive and a volitional faculty. These philosophers, however, have confined its perfection to knowledge alone, and then imagined that this knowledge is awareness of absolute existence, so that the human being becomes an intelligible intellect parallel to the existing world. Some of them even say that the soul lasts only so long as