the sinner’s own act of not heeding the warning, is made clear on another occasion also: “And there are those of them who seek to listen to thee, till, when they go forth from thee, they say to those who have been given knowledge: What was it that he said just now? These are they whose hearts Allāh has sealed and they follow their low desires” (47:16).

All these verses show that God sets a seal upon the hearts of certain people as a result of their own actions. They do not listen to the Holy Prophet’s call, they give no heed to his warning, they do not try to understand what he says, and the result is that God seals their hearts. If a person closes upon himself the doors of his house, he will naturally be in darkness. Just in the same manner, those who themselves close the doors of their hearts are visited with the natural consequence of this, the setting of a seal. The seal, therefore, being the consequence of a man’s own deeds, has nothing to do with the doctrine of predestination.

Ḥadīth and predestination

Some of the ḥadīth from which predestination is concluded may now be considered, but it has to be borne in mind clearly that Ḥadīth must be read subject to the broad principles established in the Holy Qur’ān, and must be so interpreted as not to clash with the Book of God, and that in case of a clash it is the Ḥadīth that must be rejected; for its words are often the words of narrators, and in such metaphysical subjects there has been a good deal of mixing up of the ideas of the narrators through a long chain of transmitters. There is a great deal of difference between Ḥadīth relating to the rules and regulations of daily life, which every man could easily understand and retain in memory, and those relating to metaphysical subjects where the ideas of the transmitters would, sometimes quite unintentionally, and sometimes on account of not clearly understanding the real concept of the words, affect the narration of the report, and where the change of a single word may sometimes change the underlying idea entirely.

Bearing this in mind we may consider the reports narrated in the Book of Qadar in Bukhārī, but first a ḥadīth may be considered which,