The Quran

Preface

وَنَزَعنا ما في صُدورِهِم مِن غِلٍّ تَجري مِن تَحتِهِمُ الأَنهارُ ۖ وَقالُوا الحَمدُ لِلَّهِ الَّذي هَدانا لِهٰذا وَما كُنّا لِنَهتَدِيَ لَولا أَن هَدانَا اللَّهُ ۖ لَقَد جاءَت رُسُلُ رَبِّنا بِالحَقِّ ۖ وَنودوا أَن تِلكُمُ الجَنَّةُ أورِثتُموها بِما كُنتُم تَعمَلونَ

Yusuf Ali

And We shall remove from their hearts any lurking sense of injury;-¹ beneath them will be rivers flowing;- and they shall say: “Praise be to God, who hath guided us to this (felicity): never could we have found guidance, had it not been for the guidance of God. indeed it was the truth, that the messengers of our Lord brought unto us.” And they shall hear the cry: “Behold! the garden before you! Ye have been made² its inheritors, for your deeds (of righteousness).”

A man who may have suffered or been disappointed may have a lurking sense of injury at the back of his mind, which may spoil his enjoyment on account of past memory intruding in the midst of felicity. In such cases memory itself is pain. Even sorrow is intensified by memory: as Tennyson says, “A sorrow’s crown of sorrows is remembering happier things.” But that is in this our imperfect life. In the perfect felicity of the righteous, all such feelings will be blotted out. No “heartaches” then and no memories of them! The clouds of the past will have dissolved in glorious light, and no past happiness will be comparable with the perfect happiness which will have then been attained. Nor will any sense of envy or shortcoming be possible in that perfect bliss.
Jesus said: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”: Matt. 5:5.
Here we are told: blessed are the righteous, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven. The stress here is on actual practical deeds of righteousness: whether they find their rewards on earth or not is immaterial: their attention is directed to an infinitely greater reward, the kingdom of Heaven. In the Sermon on the Mount this is promised to the “poor in spirit”: Matt. 5:3.