Surah 11. Hud, Ayah 118

I.e., about everything, even about the truths revealed to them by God. - For a discussion of the term ummah wahidah ("one single community") and its wider implications, see surah {2}, notes [197] and [198]; the second part of 2:253 and the corresponding note [245]; and the second part of 5:48 and the corresponding notes [66] and [67]. Thus, the Qur'an stresses once again that the unceasing differentiation in men's views and ideas is not incidental but represents a God-willed, basic factor of human existence. If God had willed that all human beings should be of one persuasion, all intellectual progress would have been ruled out, and "they would have been similar in their social life to the bees and the ants, while in their spiritual life they would have been like the angels, constrained by their nature always to believe in what is true and always to obey God" (Manar XII, 193) - that is to say, devoid of that relative free will which enables man to choose between right and wrong and thus endows his life - in distinction from all other sentient beings - with a moral meaning and a unique spiritual potential.

Cf. x. 19. All mankind might have been one. But in Allah's Plan man was to have a certain measure of free-will, and this made difference inevitable. This would not have mattered if all had honestly sought Allah. But selfishness and moral wrong came in, and people's disputations became mixed up with hatred, jealousy, and sin, except in the case of those who accepted Allah's grace, which saved them. The object of their creation was to raise them up spiritually by Allah's grace. But if they will choose the path of evil and fall into sin, Allah's decree must be fulfilled, and His justice will take its course. In the course of that justice Hell will be filled with men and jinns, such is the number of those who go astray.