On the other hand, if our independent choices and judgements determine more and more of our identity, if we deliberately filter GOD’s One Light through our sense of a separate self that we own and control, and if we distinguish our freedom ever more emphatically from that of GOD’s, the Light of GOD is obscured by the shade we take to be our independent power source. We start to feel that His Light is intrusive, His Power arbitrary, and His Judgement in need of further judgement. This attitude becomes our altitude – a vicious circle of lower respect and dimmer understanding.
Hence the expression: He whom GOD misguides. The lack of GOD’s Guidance is termed misguidance and attributed to Him – a ‘miss’, a negative, portrayed as a positive act. Insofar as we base our acts on this negative, we can say that GOD misguides us, as the power to do anything comes from Him. But the direction, heading away from Light, is in fact no way at all – you will not find for him a way. If anything can be said to lead to nothing, it is our choice of no way as our way. What we choose de jure, considering it to be right, becomes de facto, an accomplished fact, by the momentum of His Light . . . being turned off. Nothing is absent from GOD’s Will, not even Satan and the choices he suggests to us. When we make those choices ours, we have chosen GOD’s misguidance. So He wills it, and so it comes to us, disguised as our own light.*
* Consider the concepts of GOD’s guidance and misguidance as pre-emptive negations of the Western individualist tendency to claim total ownership and autonomy of one’s acts. If you did good, GOD was there before you, giving you a reason to thank Him for His Guidance. And if you did wrong, the power to do so came from GOD likewise. As an act, it manifested His Misguidance, for it took you farther from His Light. But the choice was yours; you intended and approved of it when it was done through you, and under your impression that you alone were acting.
For those who have trouble accepting the concept of the dual Will of GOD, which I discussed earlier as the Command of power and the Command of obligation, consider karma as a metaphysical contrast. Karma in Brahmanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths of the East implements the moral rule of good for good and evil for evil as a natural law of cause and effect. What we perform with deeds or intend in our hearts is rewarded or punished, impartially, automatically, and inscrutably, in the course of our lives or over the course of many lives – hence the need for reincarnation. In this system, our unquenchable thirst for fairness is sated by an unwavering guarantee that not only what we will receive in the future but also what we have now is just; our present suffering or enjoyment is the outcome of what we did, said, or intended in the past.
In this system, too, free will could be problematic. What we will now could be considered the effect of previous deeds and intentions, in a chain of cause and effect that conceivably extends indefinitely into the past. Our Western emphasis on individual free will is, in any case, of little relevance to such a system. On the contrary, the trend in Eastern faiths is to regard the self as merely the vehicle of the actions that bind us as cogs to the wheel of karma. When we relinquish the concept of self, the karmic machine grinds on without us. We – our illusory selves, that is – are nowhere to be found. This non-presence within the mechanism of ethical cause and effect is referred to as extinction, or nirvana.
All of these basic concepts have their analogues in Qur’anic theology. Although karma’s endless chain of causation and reincarnation are not found in the Qur’an as such, resurrection and the Everafter are essential pillars of the faith, and serve a similar need for compensatory justice. The Way (sunnah) of GOD normally operates in the same way karma does, as an invariable law of reward and retribution.
The good one does is for oneself, and sin is done against it. Then unto your Lord you are returned. (Q45:15)
مَنْ عَمِلَ صَالِحًا فَلِنَفْسِهِ وَمَنْ أَسَاءَ فَعَلَيْهَا ثُمَّ إِلَى رَبِّكُمْ تُرْجَعُونَ
The self-noughting of nirvana, moreover, is basically the same as the extinction, or fana, referred to here:
Everything on it [the Earth] is vanishing, / And there remains the Visage of your Master, Lord of Majesty and Honour. (Q55:26-27)
كُلُّ مَنْ عَلَيْهَا فَانٍ
وَيَبْقَى وَجْهُ رَبِّكَ ذُو الْجَلاَلِ وَالإِكْرَامِ
The GOD You Already Know 
I get the impression that sometimes, people are sort of an after-thought because what really matters is not how Karma works, but the certainty that a misdeed will be rectified, if not in this life then the next. We’re sort of here to exercise a right that God gave us – to chose between right and wrong.
Most people get the impression that Karma will rectify a wrongdoing in this life.
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