How will the Place of Mustering be Built, and How will People be Gathered Together there? Will they be Naked? How will we be able to Meet Friends there and Find God’s Noble Messenger to Request his Intercession? How will God’s Messenger Meet Countless People Personally? How will the People of Paradise and Hell be Clothed? Who will Show us the Way?

 

The answers to those questions are found very clearly in the books of Hadith. So, I will only mention a few points relevant to our way:

The earth draws a huge circle through its annual movement and empties every year into the tablets of that circle the immaterial outcome of its yearly life – the immaterial consequences of what has happened on it throughout the year. On the Day of Judgment, the total outcome of the earth’s whole life will take on the form peculiar to the Hereafter. As the earth will submit, on the Last Day, the minor hell in its center, it will also empty its contents into the Place of Mustering, which will be built on the annual orbit of the earth.

• It has been decisively proved that the dead will be resurrected on the Day of Judgment and assembled in the Place of Mustering.
• How a single person – God’s Messenger – will meet everyone has been proved in the Sixteenth, Thirty-first and Thirty-second Words. Just as a single sun can be present, by virtue of being a luminary, at the same moment in countless different places, so too, God’s Messenger can, through the luminosity of his spirit, be present at the same time in thousands of different places and meet millions of people.
• God Almighty supplies in this life a natural covering for His living creatures except man. So, as a requirement of His being All-Wise, He will provide a natural covering in the Place of Mustering for people who will be naked of artificial clothes. Man wears artificial clothes in this world not only to shelter from cold and heat or to cover his private parts but also as a sign of his commanding position over other species of creation and disposal of them. If this was not so, he would be clothed quite simply. Without this wisdom, requiring man to be clothed somewhat elaborately, a man dressed in rags would be ridiculed among other conscious beings. However, since this wisdom will not be sought in the Place of Mustering, there will be no need for man to be dressed in artificial clothes.
• The guide for those who, like you, sheltered in the world under the light of the Qur’an, will be the Qur’an itself. Look at the opening verses of the Qur’an beginning with Alif-Lam-Mim, Alif-Lam-Ra and Ha-Mim, and see what an acceptable intercessor, what a true guide and what a sacred light, the Qur’-an is.
• Concerning the clothes of the people of Paradise and Hell:

A man of Paradise desires to get, at the same time, uninterrupted pleasure from every section of Paradise. Paradise has innumerable kinds of beauties with which he has continual intercourse. So, he clothes himself in specimens of those beauties, thus each becoming a miniature paradise. In the same way as a man grows in his own garden a sample of each kind of flower in his country, or a shopkeeper lists the examples of the items in his shop, or a man makes a piece of furniture out of the specimens of the creatures with which he has a relation, a man of Paradise will be dressed by God’s Mercy in a special garment showing the beauties of Paradise in a way to please each sense and feeling, and satisfy each faculty, of theirs, especially one who has been able to worship God in the world with all his senses and faculties and therefore deserves all the pleasures of Paradise. The garments to be worn by the people of Paradise will not be of the same kind; every one of them, from the most outer to the most inner, is of a different level to please senses and feelings in a different way with its different particular beauties. It is likewise in accordance with wisdom and justice that, since the people of Hell committed in the world sins with their eyes, ears, hearts, hands, intellects and so on, they will be dressed in garments of different kinds which will each cause them to suffer a special torment and be like a miniature hell for them.

 

This article has been adapted from Risale- i Nur Collection.