Allah Most High says in the Qur’an, “Every soul will, without doubt, fully experience death.” (3:185, 21:35, 29:57)
We will all die. You will die, I will die, and everyone that we all know will die. But what exactly does it mean to die? What is death?
When we die, we stop breathing, our heart stops beating, our brain’s electrical impulses stop, our joints become stiff, our body grows cold, stops moving, and starts to decay. When our body changes like this, we die.
But even though these bodily changes always accompany death, none of them is the “full experience of death” that Allah Most High mentions in the Qur’an. The ending of breathing accompanies death, but it is not the experience of death itself. The ending of our heartbeat accompanies our deaths, but it is not our experience of death itself. The ending of our brain activity, the stiffening of our joints, and our bodies growing cold all accompany our deaths, but they are not our experience of death.
Bodily changes such as these always accompany our conscious experiences. But when we observe ourselves, we know—clearly, immediately, and without any inference—that these bodily changes are not identical with our conscious experiences. Our experience of happiness is accompanied by increasing levels of the hormones dopamine and serotonin, but the increased levels of those hormones is not what our happiness is. Our experience of stress is accompanied by increasing levels of the hormone cortisol, but those increased levels of cortisol are not what our stress is. We are not our bodily changes. We are not our bodies. We are our souls.
Our soul is a strange thing—we cannot see it, touch it, or measure it, but we clearly know that it is there. We know that our happiness, our stress, our hope, our fear, our gratitude, our love, are not our bodily changes, but experiences that take place in our souls, apart from, different from, distinct from the changes in our bodies.
Let’s return now to the question of this post: “What is death?” The answer to this question depends on what happens to our souls—our selves, in other words—when we die. We know that when someone dies, their lungs stop breathing, their hearts stop beating, their brains stop pulsing, their joints become stiff, their bodies grow cold and start decaying, but we don’t know what happens to their souls because their souls are apart from, different from, distinct from their bodies, and the ones who die are their souls, not their bodies. We don’t know what happens to their souls. We don’t know what happens to them.
There are two possibilities. Either they—their souls, in other words—stop existing when their bodily functions stop and they die, or they—their souls, in other words—continue to exist, persisting beyond their bodies into another kind of life.
There is no scientific evidence for or against either possibility. This not a question that science can answer because no scientist can conduct any repeatable experiment to tell us what someone experiences when they die. A repeatable experiment to find out what really happens when someone dies would look something like this. Take a hundred people. Let them die. Then ask them what happened. The problem, as you can see, is that once they die, they no longer speak to us. They cannot tell us what happened. When a scientist or a doctor or anyone else claims that death is the end of our existence, they are making a claim in haste and without any evidence to support it.
The Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace) told us that our deaths are a movement from this life into another life, into a life that will last forever, a life in which we will be called to account for our belief and deeds in this life, and that our purpose in this life is to prepare ourselves for that everlasting life.
Those who disbelieved in him turned away, and claimed (in the words of Allah Most High in the Holy Qur’an) that,