Transliteration:( Wallaahu khalaqakum suma yatawaffaakum; wa minkum many-yuradu ilaaa arzalil 'umuri likai laa ya'lama ba'da 'ilmin shai'aa; innal laaha 'Aleemun Qadeer (section 9) )
"Allah has created you, and then He will cause you to die [147]. And some of you are turned towards the worst part of life [148], so that they will not know even after having knowledge [149]. No doubt, Allah is All-Knowing and All-Powerful."
From this we learn that even though the angels are tasked with taking the soul, Allah attributes the act of death to Himself, saying:
“We cause you to die.”
This is because the works of the special servants, such as angels, are ultimately under Divine command, and hence, the real doer is Allah Almighty.
This refers to the physical and mental decline that often occurs after the age of sixty. During this phase:
Strength diminishes drastically,
Senses weaken, and
Memory fades, to the point that one may forget even what was once mastered.
Sayyiduna Abdullah ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him) states that a pious believer does not experience this kind of deterioration. Instead, he may gain wisdom and increased awareness in old age. However, those very close to Allah may forget the world—not due to weakness, but because of being engrossed in Divine presence and communion.
There are five stages of human life:
Infancy – up to 7 years
Childhood – up to 14 years
Prime of life – up to 30 years
Middle age – until old age sets in
Old age – when faculties decline
These changing conditions are clear signs that man is fully under Divine control. After death, Allah can keep him in that state as long as He wills, and then resurrect him whenever He pleases, with no limit to His knowledge or power.
70. And Allah created you and then He will cause you to die; and among you there are some who are sent back to senility, so that they know nothing after having known (much). Truly, Allah is Knowing, capable of all things.
Allah tells us that He is controlling the affairs of His servants. He is the One Who created them out of nothing, then He will cause them to die. But there are some of them that He allows to grow old, which is a physical weakness, as Allah says:
(Allah is He Who created you in (a state of) weakness, then gave you strength after weakness, then after strength gave (you) weakness) (30:54)
(so that they know nothing after having known.) meaning, after he knew things, he will reach a stage where he knows nothing because of weakness of mind due to old age and senility. Thus Al-Bukhari, when commenting on this Ayah, reported a narration from Anas bin Malik that the Messenger of Allah used to pray:
(I seek refuge with You from miserliness, laziness, old age, senility, the punishment of the grave, the Fitnah of the Dajjal and the trials of life and death.) Zuhayr bin Abi Sulma said, in his famous Mu`allaqah: “I became exhausted from the responsibilities of life. Whoever lives for eighty years, no wonder he is tired. I saw death hitting people like a crazed camel, and whoever it hit dies, but whoever is not hit lives until he grows old.”
(16:70) Allah has created you, and then He causes you to die.[60] Some of you have your lives prolonged to an abject old age, when one loses all knowledge after having acquired it.[61] Allah is All-Knowing, All-Powerful.
60. It is to emphasize this: Allah not only provides you with the necessities and good things of life (as stated in the preceding verses), but also has full power over your life and death. None else has any power to give lift or cause death.
61. This fact has been mentioned to bring home to the disbelievers and the mushriks that knowledge, which gives superiority to man over all creatures on this earth, has been given by Allah, as if to say: You yourselves have seen that when a man, who once possessed much knowledge, becomes very old, he is reduced to a mere lump of flesh. Then that man who once taught knowledge to others loses all his senses and cannot look even after his own self.
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