The Shopping Malls of Heaven: and the Meaning of Life

By Saeed Kauser

The Shopping Malls of Heaven and the Meaning of Life presents a more detailed description of heaven than has previously been available. If you believe in heaven, have you ever wondered what it will be like? Will it be a physical place or a spiritual one? Will there be houses in heaven? Will we eat and drink? Will we go shopping? The Shopping Mal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sublime Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780978398439

Book preview

Preface

Like many people, I have pondered over the reason for our existence and the meaning of life and have arrived at what I believe to be a satisfactory answer. In my view, the answer lies in teachings about the afterlife as taught by Christianity and Islam, and I would like to share my findings with you in this book.

Let us consider that everything we do in this life is usually done with a goal in mind. We are likely to know what our goal is, and we make an effort towards achieving it. Surely the most important goal we should all have is to fulfill our life's purpose. But what if the whole purpose of life on this earth were to gain entry into heaven? Most of us have only a vague idea of what heaven will be like, so how can we do what is necessary to go there? This book offers a detailed description of heaven, and it is my hope that the information provided here will motivate us to do what is required to be admitted into it.

A major objective for me in writing this book is to share my knowledge with my sons, nieces, nephews, and other family members. In addition, I hope that the book will reach young people everywhere, as well as everyone who is seeking a meaning for their lives.

I would like to mention that the translation of the Qur’an from which I have quoted is by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, published by Oxford University Press.

Introduction

Do you believe in heaven? Have you ever wondered what it might be like? Will it be a physical place or a spiritual one? Will there be houses in heaven? Will we eat and drink? Will we go shopping? These are the questions I’ve often asked myself. In this book, I will provide precise answers to these questions and give the reader a more detailed description of heaven than has been available previously.

Having been raised Muslim, I have drawn from both traditional and less well known Islamic sources. Islamic texts give fairly detailed descriptions of heaven, but even many Muslims are unaware of this information, including myself until not very long ago. Although this knowledge has been available for over a thousand years, I never knew many of the details about the afterlife until I began delving deeper into the subject.

The information I uncovered creates such a vivid picture of heaven that it has forever changed my own view of life. Now this world doesn’t seem so important anymore, and my goal in life is to go to heaven and to share this information with others so that they, too, can go to heaven. Isn’t this what all the prophets tried to do? They believed in God and the afterlife, and they tried their best to tell people about it.

I’ve been interested in the subject of life after death for a long time and have been aware of many of the details from Islamic teachings, but the overall picture was still fairly vague in my mind. Very often, while walking around in nice shopping malls, I would ask myself whether there could be something similar to these in heaven. Shopping malls are pleasant places, with beautifully decorated stores and well-dressed people. It occurred to me that maybe in heaven there might be public places where good-looking people in gorgeous clothes would be walking around among shops, restaurants, and beautiful surroundings. Then one day, I happened to be watching a video about a tradition of Prophet Muhammad, and it described how residents of heaven will have a meeting with God, and afterward they will visit a marketplace where they will receive free gifts. That was a moment of epiphany for me, as it answered the question I had been thinking about. There really will be shopping malls in heaven. This thought made the concept of heaven seem much more real to me than it had ever been before. It was as though I had been transported there. I suppose the human desire for material possessions is so strong that it took the promise of free gifts to get my attention. The thought of there being marketplaces in heaven full of wondrous goods inspired me to search for more details.

My subsequent research produced a wealth of information that I had never known to exist. For me, the result is that heaven now feels so real that it seems as though it is ready and waiting for me to arrive there. It’s like planning a trip to a beautiful holiday resort—you already have a good idea about what to expect, although the reality is often even better than what you imagined. In fact, the amount of information that we may have about an exotic vacation package before making a booking is likely to be similar to, or less than, what we know about the afterlife as described in Islamic literature.

Most of the details in this book are derived from reliable sources that are easily accessible, but I’ve also tried to uncover less well-known details and attempted to find all available information on the subject. I believe that I’ve tapped into all extant knowledge on the subject—although there’s always the chance of some tidbits of information being hidden away from view on a dusty library shelf somewhere that I may have missed.

The main and most well known source is the Qur’an, which has many vivid descriptions of heaven—far more than the Bible. Among all Islamic sources, the information in the Qur’an is considered to be the most authentic, as it is believed by Muslims to have been dictated by God himself and is preserved in its original form. I have quoted over two hundred verses from the Qur’an that mention heaven, although there are many more that are repetitions.

The second major source of information consists of various collections of Hadith,¹ which are the traditions of Prophet Muhammad describing things he did and said. There are many hadith collections, and I’ve studied all the major ones. Six of them are considered to be the canonical texts of Islam and include Bukhari, Muslim, Dawood, Tirmidhi, Ibn e Majah, and Al-Nasai. Two others are Ahmed and Malik. All these texts date back to the ninth century, and almost everything written by Islamic scholars after that time is based on these books. I have provided almost two hundred and fifty references from the Hadith.

Beyond that, there are dozens of books written on the subject of heaven, some contemporary and a few from a long time ago. One famous book is called Hadi al-arwah ila bilad al-arfah (The Leader of the Souls to the Land of Joy), which was written by a reputable scholar, Ibn Qayyim Al Jawzyya, almost 700 years ago in Damascus.² Unfortunately there’s no English translation of this book that I know of, and it would be great if someone could translate it.

In addition, there are numerous lectures by scholars available on video sites, such as YouTube, that are a source of many interesting details. I also draw ideas from other Abrahamic religions—Judaism and Christianity—and even New Age beliefs, and from science.

For me, there is no contradiction between religion and science. Religion merely describes the reality that lies beyond the point where science reaches its limit. Heaven, as described here, seems to be an advanced high-tech environment where those things will be a reality that humans are always trying to achieve on earth, such as bodies that don’t die, peace and security, and unlimited wealth. Heaven will be a real physical place—maybe it already exists in a parallel universe—and at any given moment in time, we are seconds away from being transported there, because with our last breath, we will find ourselves in a whole new universe.

I hope that people of varying beliefs will derive benefit from this book. If you’re already a Muslim, then you have a head start because you already believe in God, resurrection, judgment, and heaven and hell. For you, this book will provide more details.

I am particularly hoping that Christians, whether practicing or not, will read this book. If you’re a Christian, then it’s likely that you already believe in heaven, so you’re a potential beneficiary of the information I present here. According to surveys, more than eighty percent of Americans believe in an afterlife, but various denominations have differing opinions about details such as whether heaven is physical or not. Some churches hold beliefs that can be considered very similar to Islamic ones.

The reason this book will be of great value to even the most dedicated Christian is that the information on the afterlife available in Islamic literature is far more detailed than what is available in Christian eschatology. You will be able to fill in a lot of gaps in your knowledge of heaven, and it will, hopefully, start seeming much more real to you. The best book on the Christian view of heaven is Randy Alcorn’s Heaven, which I found to be very close to the Islamic viewpoint. If you’ve read that book, then this one should fill you in with many additional details.

Even if you are not a believer, you should read this book. At the minimum, it will introduce you to a fantastic world that beats anything in science fiction. It reminds me of reading a news item on CNN’s website about how some people became depressed and suicidal after watching the movie Avatar because they longed to experience the beautiful world, Pandora, depicted in that movie, and they were sad that it’s not possible to go there. Heaven, on the other hand, is infinitely better than Pandora and is as real as this world, and it is actually possible to go there. After reading descriptions of all the good things available in heaven, you might even be convinced that it really does exist and you would like to go there.

For those who are already convinced of the existence of heaven and have a desire to go there, I will present you with a roadmap. I will tell you about the minimum requirements for going to heaven—which is to believe in one God. Just as heaven is real, hell is also real, and I will also tell you how to avoid it. Going directly to heaven while avoiding any time in hell is the supreme triumph for man, and I hope to help you achieve that objective.

I would like to add a disclaimer here. I am a layperson, not an Islamic scholar, and this book should be considered my own personal interpretation of Islamic teachings about heaven, not a scholarly work. Even though I have derived all my facts from authentic Islamic sources and provided over four hundred references, I have also added many thoughts of my own.

What I have attempted to do is similar to what paleontologists do when they take fossils from the ground and use them to reconstruct whole dinosaurs. In movies, you can see dinosaurs that look almost real. What they have done is to use bones and fragments to reconstruct complete dinosaur bodies using logic and imagination. They don’t just show you skeletons and leave you to imagine the rest of the animal yourself; they make the effort to reconstruct the whole dinosaur and show you the finished product. Similarly, I have used authentic material and added my logic and imagination to paint a more complete picture of heaven. Where there are gaps in the available information, I have filled them with my own speculation. If you were to go back in time and see real dinosaurs, it’s likely that you would recognize them because real dinosaurs were probably fairly similar to the ones you see in paintings and movies. I hope that where I’ve filled in the gaps with my own ideas, the reality will not be too far off.

Significance of the Number Seven

The number seven occurs frequently in various hadiths, especially in the form of seven, seventy, or seventy thousand. This comes from a cultural tradition of the time.

When this number is mentioned, it shouldn’t necessarily be taken literally as describing an exact quantity of something; rather it should be understood to mean a lot, as today we might use the number one hundred in a similar context. One technique may be to mentally substitute the number hundred for the number seventy. So, if the Hadith says you’ll have seventy of something, you can imagine that you’ll have a hundred of that, and when it says seventy thousand, you can think of one hundred thousand.

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What Is Heaven All About?

Our souls yearn for heaven. Whether one believes in God or not, it is a condition of being human that we all seek security, comfort, beauty, and perfection. It seems to be built into human nature.

What causes our souls to seek perfection? The reason for this can be explained by perusing the story of man’s creation as told in the Qur’an and Hadith. We’re told that mankind was created to live in a perfect heaven, but then we ended up being downgraded to this less-than-perfect earth. If someone has grown up living a life of luxury and is then reduced to poverty, he will never be at ease and will always yearn for what he’s lost, and that’s our condition in this world. Our souls were designed to live in a perfect environment, but we’ve ended up in this imperfect world, and I’ll tell you the story of how that transpired.

God himself is intangible and without any material form. He created all of existence, including this universe and perhaps many others. He also created infinitely many kinds of life forms, many of which are intelligent beings, like angels and humans. Some of the intelligent beings, such as angels, do exactly what they’re told, like automatons, while there are some that have free will, like humans. There are many inhabited worlds out there in the universe, and one of them is this earth inhabited by us, with the first humans having been Adam and Eve.

Scientists tell us that humans developed through evolution over many millions of years. I believe that it is true that our bodies evolved over millions of years, just as scientists tell us, but the creatures that existed previously were not real humans. They were, for all intents and purposes, animals with a high degree of intelligence but no souls. Since some people believe that animals also have souls, one could say that the early hominids had animal souls, not human ones. At some point in time, a new creature was introduced into this world with a soul, and that creature was Adam, the first human. This happened about ten thousand years ago, which is around the time that civilization began on earth. Although archaeological records exist of humanoids being present tens of thousands of years ago, most traces of settled civilizations don’t go back more than around ten thousand years, which is the approximate time of Adam and Eve’s arrival on earth.

Many inhabited worlds may have existed on other planets before our time, maybe millions of years ago. Many may exist now all over the universe, and others will exist after we’re gone. At some point in time, God decided to create another being with intelligence and free will and test them to see how they would behave. That’s where our story begins.

God created Adam from physical matter, as opposed to the angels, who were made from light, and jinn, who were made from fire. We created man from an essence of clay. (23:12) Then He molded him; He breathed from His Spirit into him; He gave you hearing, sight, and minds. How seldom you are grateful! (32:9) After God had created both Adam and Eve, he put them in heaven. But you and your wife, Adam, live in the Garden. Both of you eat whatever you like, but do not go near this tree or you will become wrongdoers. (7:19)

God created Adam in two stages: first he fashioned his body from physical matter and then blew into him from his own spirit. This is an important point in understanding the difference between body and spirit. The body is made from physical matter, while the soul is intangible and nonmaterial, created from the spirit of God, blown directly into the body, and humans are made in the image of God.¹

Being made in the image of God means having characteristics similar to his. The Qur’an lists ninety-nine names of God, each of which is an attribute of his personality, and we’re able to understand what they mean because we have a similar nature. For example, Ar-Rahman means the compassionate, and humans also have compassion; Al-Alim means the knowing, and humans also have knowledge; Al-Khaliq means the creator, and humans also like to create things; and so on with almost all the names of God. God may have many more attributes, but the ones we’ve been informed about are similar to the ones we have.

When Adam and Eve were created, their bodies were not the same as the ones we have on earth, since they were living in heaven, which is in a different universe, and their bodies were perfectly matched to inhabit that environment. Their souls were also different from the ones on earth, optimized for a life in heaven.

Let me say here that the consensus view in Islam is that the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve dwelled, was not on this earth, and it was either the same heaven as the one we will be going to, or one similar to it.

Heaven, as we will describe in this book, will be a totally different and perfect environment. The weather in heaven will be different; there will be no sleep, and the food and drinks will be different, and all of these things will require a different kind of body suitable for living in a new world. Therefore, our bodies in heaven will not be the same as the ones we have on earth.

The same is true for a soul living in heaven. Although all souls are created exactly alike, and the same souls we have on earth will be the ones we will have in heaven, there are certain characteristics, or properties of our souls on earth, that will be missing when we’re living in heaven; our negative characteristics, such as jealousy, greed, envy, etc., will no longer exist. These traits may help us survive on earth by making us more competitive and providing us with additional motivation to struggle to get ahead, but in heaven, these behaviors will not be required or welcomed and will be eliminated.

We will see later in the book how, before entering heaven, we will be given a drink from a spring that will result in all our negative feelings being switched off.

After Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in heaven, it switched on all the negative characteristics of the soul that they had been shielded from until that time, which also explains why, after eating the fruit, they suddenly became conscious of their nakedness and began to feel ashamed, which is a negative feeling, and started trying to cover their bodies with leaves.

Because our souls are designed to live in heaven, albeit with negative characteristics switched off, when we’re living on a vastly inferior planet like earth, our souls yearn for the perfection that only exists in heaven and cannot be found on earth.

Our souls were created from the spirit of God and optimized for living in a perfect body in a perfect environment. Therefore, heaven is the only place where we can ever be fully at peace with ourselves and with our surroundings. When superior souls were put in inferior bodies and made to live on an inferior planet, this resulted in a mismatch, which led to unhappiness and a struggle to replicate heaven on earth, whether by trying to surround themselves with luxury, creating beautiful works of art, wearing beautiful clothes, or walking in a nice garden, etc. All these things are characteristics of heaven, and heaven seems to be so deeply ingrained in our souls that sometimes we get inspired and actually manage to create exquisite artwork that seems to come from another world. I believe that when people create art, they’re actually tapping into an innate knowledge of heaven that each of us has deep within our souls.

Our real home, therefore, is heaven, not earth, and the real struggle in this life is to somehow get back to where we really belong. This, then, is the fundamental purpose of life from our point of view, and all our actions are supposed to be directed towards achieving the aim of entering heaven.

It may be asked, If we were meant to live in heaven, then why did God put us here on earth, and how do we go to heaven? I will try to answer the former question here, and address the latter one at the end of the book and explain what is required to get into heaven.

Why Did God Create Us?

Why did God create us in the first place? Only by figuring out the purpose of our existence and then doing what we’re required to do can we expect to get into heaven.

There are two kinds of intelligent beings: those with free will and those without. Each of these can exist in a material state with physical bodies or in a non-physical state. By non-physical I mean non-solid, for angels are made from light; they are composed of some sort of light particles, like photons, which technically have physical properties.

Angels are nonmaterial beings without free will, and Islam also recognizes another category of nonmaterial beings, called jinn, that have free will. Humans are material beings with free will, whereas in heaven we are going to encounter physical, human-like beings, both male and female, without free will.

Before the creation of mankind, there already existed angels and jinn. We created man out of dried clay formed from dark mud—the jinn We created before, from the fire of scorching wind. (15:27) Angels are intelligent and do exactly what they’re told without any disobedience, although they do ask questions if they don’t understand something. [Prophet], when your Lord told the angels, ‘I am putting a successor on earth,’ they said, ‘How can You put someone there who will cause damage and bloodshed, when we celebrate Your praise and proclaim Your holiness?’ but He said, ‘I know things you do not.’ (2:30) Angels ask questions for their own knowledge, but do exactly what they’re told, without hesitation.

The above verse from the Qur’an makes it plain that God intended mankind to live on earth because he said, I am putting a successor on earth. The explanation for that is that God knows the future, and even before creating Adam and Eve, he would have known that they would disobey him and end up being expelled from heaven. If God stopped creating things just because he knows the final outcome of every act of creation, then he would end up creating nothing. He knows the end result of everything, but still allows events to run their course. Despite the fact that mankind was going to live on earth, human souls would have been designed for living in heaven because their sojourn on earth was to be for a short period of time, after which they were to live in heaven for eternity. Souls, once created, do not perish, as I will explain later.

The Qur’an describes how God taught Adam something and