And those whom the angels receive [in death], to the end [of the verse]: al-tawaffī is to receive fully the spirit (istīfāÌ) from the body by having it seized from it, which can be in one of three ways: the reception of [it by] the angels, the reception of [it by] the angel of death, and the reception of [it by] God. As for the angels' reception [of the spirit], that is for the folk of the souls who are either fortunate, being the good folk, those of the praiseworthy attributes and virtuous character traits from among the righteous, the Godfearing, those whom the angels receive [in death] while they are goodly, saying to them, 'Peace be upon you! Enter Paradise because of what you used to do' [Q. 16:31-32]: their final return shall be to the garden of the acts. Or they are the damned, the evil folk, those of the base attributes and the wicked character traits, whose spirits are only received by the powers of the angelic realm which in this world are the equivalent of their faculties which constitute their station, veiled as they are by attributes of the soul and the pleasures of the imaginative, estimative, predatorial and bestial faculties, the disbelievers, those whom the angels receive [in death] while they are wronging themselves [Q. 16:27-28]: their final return shall be to the Fire. As for the reception of the angel of death, that is for the possessors of hearts, those who have emerged from the veil of the soul to the station of the heart and have returned to the primordial nature and have become illumined by it. The spirits of these [latter] are seized by the universal rational soul, which is the heart of the world, because of their conjunction with it; this is the case if it is the angel of death himself who seizes their spirits. If he seizes [these spirits] by means of his assistants and their powers, then they belong to the first group [mentioned above]. He [the angel of death] may seize them himself and turn them over to the angelic realm of chastisement so that they might be brought to reckoning and requited in accordance with their vices and be rid [of them]; that will be on account of [their] perfection or deficiency of knowledge, as in the case of the one who is delivered from ignorance and associating [others with God] and becomes adorned with knowledge and the affirmation of Oneness, but upon whose heart there had accumulated dark configurations and base natures because of wicked deeds and reprehensible character traits; or on account of having knowledge of the affirmation of the Oneness but ignorance of the final return, as in the case of the affirmer of the Oneness who denies the [final] recompense and is ensconced in acts of disobedience, as God, exalted be He, says Say: the angel of death, who has been charged with you, shall receive you [in death] [Q. 32:11]. As for the reception of [spirits in death by] God, that is for the affirmers of [His] Oneness who have ascended from the station of the heart to the locus of presential vision (shuhūd) and so there remains no veil between them and their Lord. Thus He takes charge of the seizure of their spirits Himself and gathers them unto Himself the day on which We shall gather the God-fearing to the Compassionate One, as honoured delegations on mounts [Q. 19:85], and as He says God receives the souls at the time of their death [Q. 39:42]; while they are wronging their souls, by preventing them from what is due to them by virtue of their preparednesses in terms of the perfections deposited within them; [the angels will say] 'What was your predicament?', when you fell short of the effort required to [attain] what was decreed [for you] and neglected your duty to God [cf. Q. 39:56], and fell short of attaining the perfection that had been prepared for you and to which you were enjoined. They will say, 'We were oppressed, in the land of the preparedness to which we had become innately disposed by the mastery [over us] of the faculties of the commanding soul and the overwhelming power of caprice through the satanic nature of estimation: these have held us captive in their shackles, compelled us to [follow] their religion and coerced us to [adopt] their disbelief. They [the angels] will reply, 'But was not God's earth spacious: was not the capacity of your preparedness such that you might have emigrated a few steps within it from the original point of your primordial nature in such a way that when some of the veils are removed from you, you would be able to depart from the captivity of the faculties and to be rid of the fetters of caprice and would have drawn strength from the reinforcement of your helpers, the spiritual faculties, and you would have been assisted to victory by the lights of the heart and thus left the town, whose people were evildoers [cf. Q. 4:75], and which is the city (madīna) of the soul, to the goodly land of the heart whereafter the mercy of your Forgiving Lord would have reached you; that you might have emigrated therein?' As for such, their abode shall be Hell, [their abode shall be] their souls yearning intensely yet deprived - an evil journey's end!