General Beliefs
By Ayatulla Jafar Sobhani

(Continuation)
Divine predestination is not in the least incompatible with human free will. For what God has ordained for man is, precisely, free will, the very feature which distinguishes him from the animals; man has been ordained a free agent, capable of choosing to perform or to abstain from his actions. The divine decree in regard to human action is that, once the will and desire to perform a given action are established, the action will follow decisively.
In other words, the very creation of man inherently comprises freedom as regards human will, along with its capacity to evaluate and judge; in this respect, the divine decree is that whenever man decides upon an action, and possesses the necessary means to perform it, a divine power brings into effect the accomplishment of the action in question.
There are those who believe that their sinfulness is the product of divine predestination and that it was never in fact possible for them to have chosen any path other than the one which they in fact followed; but both intellect and revelation alike repudiate such an opinion.

From the intellectual point of view, man determines his destiny by means of his own decisions; from the religious point of view also, man is deemed to have the capacity to be either pious and grateful or impious and wicked, as the Qur'an says:

Verily, We have shown him the way, whether he be grateful or disbelieving.
(Sura al-Insan, LXXXVI: 3)

At the time of the Revelation, one party of idolaters attributed their idol-worship to the will of God, arguing that were it not His will, they would not have worshipped idols. The Qur'an relates their fanciful notion thus:

Those who are idolaters will say: Had God only willed, we would not have ascribed [unto Him] partners, neither would our fathers, nor would we have forbidden anything.

The response then follows:
Thus did those who were before them give the lie, till they tasted of the fear of Us.
(Sura al-An'am, VI: 48)

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