Title: Further Clarifications Regarding the Criteria of Success in the Hereafter... Question/Comments: After reading some questions and answers in your web-site regarding the Success in the Hereafter, I found that the answers are very convincing. My question is: How should we understand the following verses in Qur'an, which talk about people who think that they are rightly guided, but actually they are not, as given in: Al-Aa`raaf 7: 30 Al-Kahaf 18: 103 - 104 Al-Zukhruf 43: 37 Answer: Before answering your specific question, I would like to remind you once again that the summary of my opinion regarding success in the hereafter is that people shall be rewarded for their honest and sincere search for the truth and for surrendering and submitting to what they truly understood to be the truth. Keeping this fact in mind, if you consider the referred verses of the Qur'an, you shall see that they actually refer to those people who have knowingly rejected the guidance of the Lord of the world. They did not even have to search for the truth, God delivered His guidance to them on their doorsteps through His prophets and messengers, and yet, in their arrogance and prejudice, they rejected it. Al-Aa`raaf 7: 30 reads as: Some He has guided and some He has [justly] left in error; for they chose the devils for their masters, instead of God . And [now] they deem themselves to be on the right path. Al-Kahaf 18: 103 - 105 reads as: Say: 'Shall we inform you of him, who shall lose all his deeds? It is those whose endeavors in this world are misguided and yet they think that what they do is right; [These people are those,] who reject the revelations of their Lord and deny that they will ever meet Him .' Al-Zukhruf 43: 35 - 37 reads as: Indeed all this is nothing but utilities for the life of this world. The [pleasures of the] hereafter, are reserved for the pious by your Lord. He that shuns the remembrance of the Most Gracious (God), We appoint for him a devil, who then becomes his companion. And these devils hinder such people from the right path, while they think that they are rightly guided. If you look closely at the translations of all the referred verses, you shall see that they actually refer to such people, who knowingly opt for the wrong path (i.e. the path of the devil) rather than the right one (i.e. the path of God) knowingly reject God's guidance, or shun the right attitude (of keeping God's remembrance alive in their hearts). It is such people who are allowed to wander blindly in the darkness, without any clue of light to guide them to the right path. Then, as a further punishment for their rejection and avoidance of submitting to God's truth, God allows them to confidently think that they are rightly guided. If seen in the right perspective, this punishment is similar to the one, which has been referred in the beginning of Surah Al-Baqarah in the words: 'God has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing and there is a curtain upon their sight'. Thus, these verses do not refer to people who commit mistakes in their honest and sincere search for the truth. On the contrary, these verses relate to people, who knowingly reject the truth and as a consequence, are punished by God, Who deprives them of their basic ability to recognize the truth from falsehood and, thus, they wander in the darkness of falsehood with the false confidence that they are on the right path, free from all want of guidance. 8 th July 2000