though not accredited by the best authorities, is the stock argument of Western writers regarding predestination in Islām. This ḥadīth occurs in several different forms in Abū Dāwūd, Tirmidhī and Aḥmad, and the gist of it is that when God created Adam, He also brought forth the souls of his children. The particular form of this ḥadīth, which appeals to the Western writers, is that occurring in one report of Aḥmad: “He said to the souls on His right hand, To Paradise and I do not care; and He said to those on His left hand, To the fire and I do not care” (MM. 1:4—iii). This ḥadīth discloses such a distorted picture of Divine dealing with man that there should not be the least hesitation in rejecting it. The Holy Qur’ān says in plain words that it is for mercy that He created all men;13 it speaks of the Divine mercy as encompassing all things, like His knowledge;14 it tells the most obdurate sinner not to despair of His mercy, for “Allāh forgives the sins altogether”;15 it describes God again and again as the most Merciful of all merciful ones.16 Ḥadīth draws a similar picture of the indescribable mercy of God. It tells us that God wrote down, when He ordered creation, that “His mercy shall take precedence of His displeasure”;17 it describes God as having divided His mercy into a hundred parts and as having sent into the world only one part, the whole of love finding expression in the created beings, including the love of a mother for her offspring, being a manifestation of that hundredth part, and the other ninety-nine parts finding their expression on the Day of Resurrection, so that if the unbeliever knew of the whole of Divine mercy, he would not despair of going to Paradise;18 it draws a picture of the unbounded mercy of God when it speaks of how the Holy Prophet, on seeing a mother pressing her child to her bosom, remarked to his Companions: “Do you think that she can throw this child into the fire?” And on their replying in the negative, added: “Allāh is much more merciful to His creatures than this woman to her child.”19 Could God with all this mercy, which is beyond human conception, be in the same breath described as saying: “These to fire and I do not care?” Certainly these cannot be the words of the Holy Prophet. It is the error of some narrator in the long chain of the transmission of the report.

In another form the same ḥadīth occurs as an explanation of a verse