Chapter Two: The Answer Book and the Record of Deeds

A Paper That Is Lost and Wronged

The answer book in your hands in the smaller hall is a very fragile thing, if you look at it closely. A counted number of pages and no more; a measured span of time whose door is shut on you in the middle of a line; and handwriting that, if it is poor, loses half the meaning for whoever reads it. Then the book leaves your hand and passes into a chain of hands: a hand that collects, a hand that carries, a hand that opens, a hand that marks while it is tired at the end of the night, and a hand that enters the mark in a narrow box.

And at every link of this chain there is a chance of something going wrong: a sheet drops out of the bundle; a page sticks to its neighbour so that what is on it is never read; a mark is carried from one line to another and settles under a name not its own; a marker did not follow your short phrase and took it for ignorance when it was economy. A candidate may labour for months and then find nothing to prove his labour by, because the only witness to his long nights was a paper lost on the way. And this is the poverty at the root of every human record: that it is separate from its owner, kept in another place and read by another eye.

A Book Copied Out, and Then It Speaks

The second difference is that the answer book of this world is written after the thinking, and the record of the hereafter is written with the movement. Between doing a thing and its being set down there is no gap through which anything could slip; it is an immediate copying, with no delay in it and no revising it afterwards.

Those who take charge of this recording have been appointed over man, and they are described as noble, as writers, and as knowing what happens: “Lo! there are above you guardians, Generous and recording, Who know (all) that ye do.” (Al-Infitaar 82:10–12, Pickthall). And the recording does not stop at the outward act; it reaches the single word as it comes out of the mouth: “He uttereth no word but there is with him an observer ready.” (Qaaf 50:18, Pickthall). So the word you say in the smaller hall in a whisper to your neighbour, which the invigilator standing two steps away does not hear, has been set down in the greater hall with its letters, its tone, and the purpose that carried it.

Then comes the day it is all laid out, and what stops you in the description of it is that the book is not read out to you from another man's mouth; it speaks by itself: “This Our Book pronounceth against you with truth. Lo! We have caused (all) that ye did to be recorded.” (Al-Jaathiya 45:29, Pickthall). There is no marker in front of you to argue with and no board of appeal; the paper is the witness and the testimony at once. The book is opened and the man sees in it what he himself has forgotten out of his own old years, and he finds no small thing overlooked and no great thing made light of, and he finds his deeds present before him, not a report about deeds: “And the Book is placed, and thou seest the guilty fearful of that which is therein, and they say: What kind of a Book is this that leaveth not a small thing nor a great thing but hath counted it! And they find all that they did confronting them, and thy Lord wrongeth no-one.” (Al-Kahf 18:49, Pickthall).

Consider how the whole position is turned over. In this world you defend yourself before a silent answer book and say: I wrote, and nobody read it for me. There you have no need to defend yourself, because the paper does not keep silent; and no need to object, because it was not written by a hand that is a stranger to you.

The Height of This Part: A Marker Who Gives You a Mark for an Intention You Never Carried Out

Here every comparison between the two examinations stops and can go no further. For if you came to the most just marker on earth and the most truthful, and said to him: I intended to write this answer, it was fully present to me, I lifted my pen to write it, and then the time was up — he would do no more than apologise to you and praise your keenness. The rule in every examination of this world is one and never fails: no mark for what was not written. The blank paper is a zero, even if its owner knew more by heart than anyone in the hall. And it is a just rule in its own field, because the marker has no power to search inside anybody's head.

Now hear what came in the greater hall: “God has written down good deeds and bad ones, and then made the reckoning plain. Whoever intends a good deed and does not do it, God writes it down for him as one complete good deed; and if he intends it and does it, God writes it down as ten good deeds, up to seven hundred times over, and more still. And whoever intends a bad deed and does not do it, God writes it down for him as one complete good deed; and if he intends it and does it, God writes it down as one bad deed only.” (meaning; Sahih al-Bukhari 6491 — Abd Allah ibn Abbas, sound (sahih) — al-Bukhari).

Read it again with the eye of a man sitting the examination, not with the eye of a passing listener. An intention to do a good thing that never came out into existence, that nobody knows of, that no witness and no trace stands upon, is written down as a full good deed — not a fraction of one, and not a promise of one. And if it does come out into action it is multiplied beyond any reckoning. And on the other side: an intention to do a bad thing, and then its owner leaves it, and nothing is set down against him — it is set down for him. And the bad deed, if it happens, is set down as one and no more.

This is a scale that runs in no hall on earth and in no system of its systems. A marker who enters a mark for you on a question you did not answer, because you truly meant to answer it. Then he enters no error against you for something you intended and then turned back from, but puts the turning back itself in the column of gain. If this were put to any board in this world it would be counted a breakdown in the marking; because the boards of this world hold a man to account only for what reached the paper, having no way to anything else.

And here it becomes clear why the first chapter was a necessary opening to this one. Only He who sees the motive is able to reward the motive. Whoever's knowledge is confined to the body can weigh nothing but the body, and whoever encompasses what is hidden begins the reckoning from what is hidden. So it is the breadth of the knowledge that opened the door of this bounty; and were it not for the Watcher who never sleeps, there would be no marker who writes down for you what you never wrote with your own hand.

So when you walk out today from a smaller hall knowing that the man standing at the front has missed a great deal of you, remember that you have not walked out of the other hall, and that what escaped that one has not escaped the Other. Not so that fear should make you sit back from writing, but so that you may know that the labour of yours that nobody saw has been seen by One, and that the intention of yours that found no fruit in this world is kept with Him and has not dropped out of the reckoning.