Religion and Science
4. Religion and the Life Hereafter
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4. RELIGION AND THE LIFE
HEREAFTER
“The crux of religion is indubitably the belief in the
life hereafter.” So says Allama Shibli Nomani (1857-
1914) under the heading of ‘Life after Death’ in his
famous book,
Al Ghazzali.
He goes on to say that it
is because of this belief that religion has had an
impact on human activities. Yet, despite its being
the single most important belief in religion, it has
been open to question. He quotes a Bedouin poet
who, addressing his wife, expresses this most
succinctly:
Death, rebirth,
My dear: it is all nonsense.
Shibli feels that the first and most difficult hurdle to
be surmounted is acceptance of the fact that the
spirit survives as an entity in its own right, quite
independently of the body. The materialists for
their part think of the soul as being just one more
ingredient in the body, in the way that a chemical
element is inextricably a part of a compound, or
