Predestination in Islam

There is a common misconception in Islam that if everything is predestined by Allah, then what is our role or why should we be judged by Allah. It means that if Allah has written in destiny that a man will commit murder, why should he be blamed when he does the heinous act. This is in direct contradiction to the concept of freewill.

We know that predestination is one of the articles of faith. We also know that our God has given us freewill, a choice to do a righteous act or a sinful act. So the first counter example is that Allah is the All Knowing, All Wise, He cannot contradict Himself.

Secondly, when we do any action, we do it out of our freewill. Either we lie or tell the truth, everytime we have a choice. For example, a person commits a sin and then justifies it by saying that it was written in my destiny, that's why they did it. But it does not work that way. Allah has knowledge of the Unseen. He knows what will happen in the future so He has written it all in a book called, "Loh e Mehfooz". Allah knows that the person will commit a sin so He has written it in His Book. It is not Allah who is to blame but the person. Before we commit a crime, we don't know what is written in Allah's book so after committing the crime how can we justify ourselves that we committed that crime because Allah has already destined it. Take another example, exams are going to occur soon and a teacher being aware of the performance of each student, predicts their final grade. So when a student fails the exam, they blame it on the teacher that because she predicted they would fail, that's why they failed. Now tell me, does that judgement make any sense at all? It was upto the student to study hard and do good on the Exam. The student cannot blame their bad result on the teacher who only predicted the grade based on the student's performance. Rather, they are themselves to blame. So next time you do something good or evil, remember that you had a choice between good and evil and you are to blame yourself for doing that action.

Allah has commanded His servants to Iqrah (Read), to search for knowledge so we should never stop our quest for learning and instead encourage questions. Because that is how we learn and share knowledge among others.