God has assigned their lot to all creatures before they were created, and every creature was created by God’s determination that preceded its creation.

God’s determination of destiny: His will and cause and effect.

God has assigned their lot to all creatures before they were created, and every creature was created by God’s determination that preceded its creation. God says: ‘

It is He who has created all things and ordained them in due proportions. (25: 2)

‘We have created everything in due measure’. (54: 49) ‘God’s will is always destiny absolute’. (33: 38)

God has determined all matters and all things, good and bad. In an authentic hadith the Prophet states that an essential part of faith is ‘to believe in divine destiny, both the good and the evil of it’.


God’s knowledge is essential for His determination of destiny. No one can determine things except the One who knows them. No one knows their fine details, places, changes, beginning and end except for their Creator. God says that we must learn that

‘God has power over all things, and God encompasses all things with His knowledge’. (65: 12)

‘How could it be that He who has created should not know all? He is above all comprehension, yet is All-Aware’. (67: 14)


Whoever denies God’s determination of all things denies His knowledge, and whoever denies God’s knowledge denies His determination. What God determined for His creation is all recorded in a book kept with Him. He says:

‘No single thing have We left out of the book’. (6: 38)

‘We keep an account of all things in a clear record’. (36: 12)

God’s creation is of two types: 1) creatures that have no will of their own, such as planets and stars; and 2) creatures that have a will and freedom of choice, such as humans, jinn and angels. He has not set them on their respective courses without giving them a choice, so as to force them to disobey Him and then punish them for that. Nor did He give them total freedom without any aspect of subservience, so as to enable them to be His partners in will and action. He has given them a will that is under His will, as He says:

‘This is only a reminder to all mankind, to those of you whose will is to be upright. Yet, you cannot will except by the will of God, Lord of all the worlds’. (82: 27–9) 

God created people and their actions, as He says:

‘Do you worship something that you yourselves have carved, while it is God who has created you and all you do?’ (37: 95-6))

He created causes and determined their effects and this is the result of His perfect and complete knowledge as well as His infinite wisdom in establishing the universe in such a fine and perfect system.

It is not right for the human mind to turn away from believing in what it does not understand of God’s wisdom or its essence of God’s determination. The wisdom behind certain things may be beyond the capacity of our minds’ comprehension. The human mind is like a vessel and some wisdom is like the water of the ocean. Should too much water be poured into this vessel it would drown it, leaving it completely lost, and the continued contemplation of some wisdom only increases man’s perplexity, just like the sun at mid-day hurts our eyes if
we stare fixedly at it.

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