there are keepers over you, honourable recorders, they know what you do” (82:10-12). And elsewhere we have: “When the two receivers receive, sitting on the right and on the left. He utters not a word but there is by him a watcher at hand” (50:17,18). “Alike (to Him) among you is he who conceals the word and he who speaks openly, and he who hides himself by night and who goes forth by day. For him are (angels) guarding the consequences (of his deeds), before him and behind him, who guard him by Allāh’s command” (13:10, 11).
The guarding in the last verse refers to the guarding of man’s deeds. The angels are immaterial beings, and hence also their recording is effected in a different manner from that in which a man would prepare a record. In fact, their record exists, as elsewhere stated, in the form of the effect which an action produces: “And We have made every man’s actions cling to his neck, and We shall bring forth to him on the Day of Resurrection a book which he will find wide open” (17:13). The clinging of a man’s actions to his neck is clearly the effect which his actions produce and which he is powerless to obliterate, and we are told that this effect will be met with in the form of an open book on the Resurrection Day, thus showing that the angel’s recording of a deed is actually the producing of an effect.
The different functions of angels in the spiritual world are thus connected, in one way or another, either with the awakening of the spiritual life in man or its advancement and progress. Herein lies the reason why faith in angels is required along with a faith in God: “Righteous is the one who believes in Allāh, and the Last Day, and the angels, and the Book and the prophets” (2:177). “The Messenger believes in what has been revealed to him from his Lord, and so do the believers. They all believe in Allāh and His angels and His books and His messengers” (2:285).
Faith or belief in any doctrine, according to the Holy Qur’ān, is essentially the acceptance of a proposition as a basis for action. Faith in angels, therefore, means that there is a spiritual life for man, and that he must develop that life by working in accordance with the promptings of the angel and by bringing into play the faculties which God has given him; and that is why—though the existence of the devil,