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14introduction by muhammad shahrurDo not call, besides Allah, upon any other god. There is no god butHe. Everything will perish save His face. He is the judgement, andunto Him you shall all be returned. ( Al-Qaßaß 28:88, MF)Destruction does not mean nonexistence. It implies a new form ofexistence through a different ‘becoming’; this new ‘becoming’ in theAfterlife will be fixed and stable because of the lack of ‘progressing’.The end of this world and the creation of the Afterlife are, we mightsay, a second Big Bang which follows the first at the beginning ofthis world. Since ‘becoming’ represents the purpose of any existence,the purpose of the first Big Bang was to eventually lead to the secondBig Bang, to the creation of the Afterlife and a new existence afterdeath.What happens if we take one dimension out of this tripartite conceptof existence? We have said that ‘being’ and ‘progressing’ without‘becoming’ is existence without purpose; it is senseless and aimless.If we took ‘being’ out of the tripartite structure and leave ‘progressing’and ‘becoming’ on their own, it would imply a logically andontologically impossible fixation upon any point A on the coordinatesof ‘becoming’ and ‘progressing’. On the coordinate of ‘progressing’,that is, the dimension of time and movement, any point A wouldremain A, as movement is frozen, and on the coordinate of ‘becoming’,that is, the dimension of purpose and aim, our point A wouldturn into A’, which is self-contradictory, in the sense that A is A andyet not A—according to the dialectical logic of ‘negation’ or ‘negationof negation’ this would be impossible. This notion of an antagonisticstruggle between internal contradictions leads us to think that ‘becoming’and ‘progressing’ necessitate the dimension of ‘being’. Thedimension of ‘being’ is then expressed or manifested through movementand development. The colour red, for instance, if we take it asan example of ‘being’, exists only through the things that are red,such as a rose, a shoe, or a hat; it only exists through its manifestationin things that make it visible. Without such things the colourred would not exist (for us) visibly.We are now able to describe the following constellations with regardsto the interplay among the three dimensions or coordinates of existence: