By Name of The God The Merciful The Compassionate
Malik: Owner of Judgment
Why final judgment belongs only to The God
The Main Question
The Qur’an calls The God Malik Yawm ad-Din (Owner of the Day of Judgment). This article reflects on why that title matters: not only because The God judges, but because no human being is capable of final, complete, and absolute judgment.
Can the highest human judge, even the chief justice of the greatest court in the world, give a complete and flawless judgment in a very simple case, such as a person stealing a loaf of bread from a bakery?
At first, many people would say yes. The judge has access to the law, witnesses, evidence, cameras, reports, and visible signs.
But the more deeply we reflect on the reality of judgment, the more we realize that even the most advanced human legal system can only judge the outward appearance of an action. It cannot judge the complete truth of a human being.
A human court may make decisions about a crime in order to preserve social order. That limited function may be necessary. But no human court can judge the whole soul, intention, destiny, and inner reality of a person in an ultimate sense.
For complete and absolute judgment, at least three qualities are necessary. No human being, no matter how knowledgeable, fair, experienced, or sincere, possesses these qualities perfectly.
First: No Human Knows All Visible and Hidden Causes
Complete justice requires complete knowledge. Not only knowledge of the action itself, but knowledge of every background, cause, pressure, intention, fear, wound, and path that produced that action.
A human being may see what happened, but cannot fully know why it happened.
A camera can record the moment someone steals bread. But it cannot show hunger, shame, despair, fear, emotional injury, upbringing, genetics, social pressure, past humiliation, lost opportunities, or the many hidden forces that helped shape that person’s final decision.
Many of these factors were not chosen by the person. Yet they shaped that person’s destiny, character, capacity, and decisions.
Here the inner limitation of human judgment becomes clear: no one can truly enter another person’s mind, conscience, and inner world.
How can someone who has never had a broken hand truly know the pain of a broken hand?
Even if we imagined that a person could see all causes, judgment would become more difficult, not easier. The more we know the causes, the more we realize that human choice does not occur apart from context, pressure, and structure.
Human choice does not happen in a vacuum. Every decision is formed within a network of causes, experiences, deprivations, fears, teachings, wounds, and possibilities.
So how can we judge an action absolutely and finally when that action emerged within a chain of visible and hidden causes?
Second: Human Judgment Is Fallible
The second limitation is human nature itself.
Human beings judge with imperfect tools. Their senses can be deceived. Their memory can distort. Their reason is never fully separated from emotion, fear, desire, hatred, love, pride, culture, habit, and prior assumptions.
Even if all outward information were available to a judge, the interpretation of that information must still pass through a human mind. And the human mind is never a perfectly clear and dustless mirror.
No judge can fully separate himself or herself from the culture, religion, class, language, history, education, personal experience, and intellectual structure in which they were formed.
A judge may want justice. But wanting justice is not the same as owning justice.
Human judgment, even when necessary, useful, and more just than lawlessness, is never the final measure of truth. At its best, human judgment is a limited human attempt to move closer to justice. It is not absolute justice itself.
Third: Judging an Action Is Not Judging a Person
A human being may be able to judge an action. But no human being can pass final judgment on a person.
An action is a moment. A human being is a living stream.
The person who steals bread today may become someone tomorrow who feeds the hungry. And the person who appears righteous today may fall tomorrow into oppression, arrogance, or corruption.
If we freeze a human being in one moment, we ignore the fluid truth of that person: growing, falling, repenting, changing, and becoming.
To judge a person completely, one would have to see the whole story: from beginning to end, from intention to consequence, from possibility to reality, from wound to healing, from fall to return, and from what happened to what could have happened.
No human being trapped inside time can grasp such a vast field.
Now imagine that a perfect human appeared among us: a judge who knows everything, makes no mistake, is free from bias, and distinguishes between the action and the person.
Could such a being give complete judgment?
To answer, let us consider two reflective scenarios. These scenarios are not meant to judge prophets. They are meant to show the power of context, time, possibility, and path in shaping human destiny.
First Scenario: Two Possible Paths for Joseph
Imagine the same child, Joseph, thrown into the well by his brothers.
In one path, a caravan finds him, and eventually he reaches a house in Egypt where his talent, purity, patience, and capacity find room to grow. He learns, endures, passes through tests, and finally becomes a person who helps save nations from famine. People remember him as a symbol of purity, wisdom, and patience.
But in another imagined path, the same Joseph, with the same essence and the same capacity, is found in the same well by cruel men. They drag him into slavery, humiliation, and abuse. They break his dignity, exhaust his mind with suffering, and crush his spirit under darkness.
Would the same person, with the same capacity, produce the same outcome in such a different context?
Perhaps not.
Perhaps he would be wounded. Perhaps he would come to hate the world. Perhaps his ability to blossom would be destroyed. Perhaps instead of becoming a rescuer of others, he would become someone in need of rescue that never arrived.
So how can we judge the fruit without knowing the soil beneath the root?
How can we judge the fruit when we do not know in what soil the tree was planted, with what water it grew, what storms it endured, and what hands broke its branches?
Second Scenario: Two Possible Worlds for Muhammad
Now consider Muhammad: an orphan child who grew in the silence of the desert, in the solitude of the night, under a sky filled with stars.
Years of solitude, quiet nights, shepherding, distance from the noise of power, and direct contact with nature drew his spirit toward reflection, wakefulness, and questioning.
In such silence, a human soul could withdraw from the pollution of its age and come closer to hearing truth.
But if the same Muhammad, with the same talent, the same depth, and the same capacity, were born in today’s world, in a crowded city, surrounded by phones, advertisements, consumer culture, social media, digital games, economic pressure, competition, and the endless noise of media, would he find the same opportunity for solitude, silence, and reflection?
Could the human spirit, surrounded by constant notifications, endless images, and the noise of the modern world, still find the same space to listen, think, and be alone with itself?
The same soul, the same body, the same capacity; but two times, two environments, two paths, and perhaps two destinies.
Which version would we judge?
And on the basis of which possibility would we issue a final judgment?
The Final Barrier: Infinite Possibilities
Even if we imagined perfect knowledge, perfect infallibility, and perfect freedom from bias in a judge, one barrier would still remain: the infinity of possibilities.
Every life is only one realized path among thousands of possible paths.
A single sentence, a look, a moment, a teacher, a humiliation, an act of kindness, an illness, poverty, opportunity, accident, or even one cell can completely change the path of a human being.
To judge a soul absolutely, one would have to see not only what happened, but everything that could have happened.
One would have to see every possible branch of that person’s life.
What would have happened if they had been born into another home?
What would have happened if they had met a different person?
What would have happened if they had been wounded less?
What would have happened if they had received more love?
What would have happened if they had lived in another time?
What would have happened if another temptation, another opportunity, another fear, or another knowledge had stood before them?
No mind trapped inside time can contain such an infinity.
Only the One beyond time, the One who sees beginning and end together, the One who knows cause and effect as one whole reality, can judge in this way.
And that is only The God.
Final Judgment Belongs Only to The God
Only The God knows every cause, intention, wound, opportunity, deprivation, choice, possibility, and consequence.
Only He measures justice not merely by the outward action, but by the whole story of a soul.
Only He is the Creator of the law, the Witness of intentions, the Knower of hidden things, and the Owner of time.
This is why the Qur’an says at the beginning of Surah Al-Fatihah:
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Only the One who owns time itself can judge what happened inside time.
Human courts judge within the moment. Divine judgment takes place in the horizon of eternity.
Even the prophets, the human beings closest to truth, will stand humbly before the knowledge of The God:
The Day when The God will gather the messengers and say, “What response were you given?” They will say, “We have no knowledge. Indeed, You are the Knower of the unseen.”
This verse reveals a tremendous truth: even the prophets, with all their nearness to revelation and truth, do not claim knowledge before the boundless knowledge of The God.
Perfect justice only makes sense where there is knowledge not only of what happened, but why it happened, how it happened, what could have happened, and what the complete truth of each soul was across all possible paths.
That knowledge belongs only to the One who is the beginning and the end of every story.
Conclusion
So a human being may judge in a limited way for the order of society. But no human being should imagine himself or herself to be the owner of justice.
A human being may issue a temporary ruling about an action. But no human being can issue an absolute judgment about the final truth of another human being.
The owner of justice is The God.
And final judgment belongs only to Him.