Everyone is afraid to die, and that’s right. The uncertainty about what lies ahead is naturally scary. It may be that of all religions Islam shows the most vivid details of what happens after death and what follows after it. Islam regards death as a natural threshold to the next stage of existence.
Islamic teaching maintains that human existence continues in spiritual form after the death of the human body and emphasizes physical revival. There is a direct relationship between behavior on earth and life in the hereafter. The afterlife will be a life of rewards and punishments that will correspond to the behavior on earth. There will come a day when God will reawaken the first and the last of His creatures and judge each one fairly. Then people will enter their last place of residence, hell or paradise. Belief in life after death forces us to do the right thing and to keep ourselves away from sins. In this life on earth we sometimes see the pious suffer and the non-pious enjoy life.
Belief in life after death is one of the six articles of faith that a Muslim must be convinced for his belief to be valid. To reject it means that belief is meaningless. Think of a child who doesn’t put his hand in the fire. It doesn’t because it is convinced that it will burn. The same child is lazy about his homework for school because he may not understand what good education will mean for his future. Let us now think of a man who does not believe in the day of resurrection. Will he imagine that belief in God and a godly life will be important to him? He will think that obedience to God will not benefit him, nor will disobedience harm him. How can he lead a God-conscious life with such an attitude? With what incentive would he patiently resist the temptations of life and avoid forbidden enjoyment of worldly pleasures? And if a man does not follow God’s path, what good is his belief in God if he has any? Accepting or rejecting life after death is perhaps the greatest factor that decides an individual’s life path.
The dead, so to speak, have a permanent and conscious existence in the grave. Muslims believe that when a person dies, they enter a transition phase in life between death and revival. Many events take place in this new “world”, such as the “Trial in the Grave”, where angels ask everyone about their religion, their prophet and their Lord. The tomb is either a garden of paradise or an abyss of hell; Angels of grace visit the souls of the believers and angels of punishment come to the unbelievers.
Revival is preceded by the end of the world. God will command a magnificent angel to blow the horn. When he first blows, all the inhabitants of heaven and earth pass out, except those whom God spares. The earth becomes flat, the mountains become dust, the sky is torn apart, the planets are scattered and the graves are turned over.
The horn is blown again, whereupon people will rise from their graves, resurrected! People are reawakened from their graves with their original, physical bodies. You will enter the third and final phase of life.
God will gather all people, believers and unbelievers, Jinn and even animals. It will be an all-encompassing assembly. The angels will drive all human beings naked, uncircumcised and barefoot to the Great Level of the gathering. People will stand and wait for their judgment and humanity will sweat in desperate agony. However, the righteous among them are shielded by the shadow of God’s magnificent throne.
If the situation becomes unbearable, people will ask the prophets and messengers to work with God in their favor to save them from the misery of waiting for reckoning.
The scales are set up and people’s deeds are weighed. The disclosure of the accounts of the deeds that were done in this life then follows. The one who gets his book in the right hand will have an easy settlement. He will happily return to his family. But the person who gets their book in their left hand will wish to be dust rather than thrown into the hellfire. He will then regret and wish that his book would not have been given to him or that he would not have known it.
Then God will judge His creation. They are informed of their good deeds and sins and reminded of them. The believers will admit their mistakes and they will be forgiven. The unbelievers will have no good deeds to show because an unbeliever will be rewarded for them in this life. Some scholars believe that the punishment of an unbeliever may be reduced because of his good deeds, but not the punishment for the great sin of refusing to believe.
The Siraat is a bridge that is fortified over hell and leads to paradise. Anyone who remains steadfast in God’s religion in this world will be able to cross it easily.
After the Last Judgment, paradise and hell will be the last places of residence of the believers and the damned. They are real and everlasting. The bliss of the people in paradise should never end and the punishment of the unbelievers who are doomed to hell should never stop. It’s not like a trial / error system in some other beliefs. The Islamic perspective is more sophisticated and conveys a higher level of divine justice. This can be seen in two things: first, some believers will suffer in hell for unreached sins; secondly, both paradise and hell have different levels.
Paradise is the Eternal Garden of physical joys and spiritual pleasures. There is no suffering and physical desires are fulfilled. All wishes are fulfilled. Palaces, servants, riches, wine pouring (but not drunk), milk and honey, pleasant smells, mild voices, pure partners for intimacy – nobody will ever get bored and nobody will ever have enough!
But the greatest pleasure will be the face of their Lord, the unbelievers are not to be considered.
Hell is a hideous place of punishment for unbelievers and purification for sinful believers. Torments and punishments for body and soul: burning with fire, boiling water for drinking, boiling food for eating, chains and suffocating pillars of fire. Unbelievers will be eternally damned in it, sinful believers, on the other hand, will be taken out after a period specified by Allah and entered paradise.
Paradise is for all who have served God alone, believed and followed their prophet, and lived a decent life according to the teachings and scriptures. Hell is the final dwelling place for those who denied God, worshiped others besides Him, rejected the prophets‘ call, and lived sinful, unrepentant lives.
Source: https://www.islamland.com/deu/articles/glaube-an-das-leben-nach-dem-tod