There is a distorted understanding of destiny which is prevalent in our society. For instance, people make superficial statements about a patient who returns from death’s door, such as “he defeated his destiny”. No one is able to change his destiny. The person who returned from death’s door, didn’t die precisely because he was destined not to die at that time. It is, ironically, the destiny of those people who deceive themselves by saying “I defeated my destiny” that they should say so and maintain such a mindset.
Destiny is the eternal knowledge of Allah and for Allah, Who perceives time as a single moment and Who prevails over the whole of time and space; everything is determined and finished as a matter of destiny. We also understand from what He relates in the Qur’an that time is one for Allah: occurrences that are going to take place after our death (from our point of view) are related in the Qur’an as past events already experienced. Allah is unfettered by the relative time frame in which we are confined. Allah has willed these things in timelessness: people have already performed them and all these events have been lived through and are at an end.
