Badges mark quoted or attributed material (Qur'an, hadith, another author, an opposing view). Unbadged passages are Maulana Wahiduddin Khan's own words.
WHO ARE ANGELS?
Angels are loyal and obedient creatures of God, endowed with special powers and authority to facilitate the workings of the universe.
Angels are among the creatures created by God. They have been endowed with special powers. They have all the power and authority to facilitate the workings of the universe. But all their actions are in total submission to God; not even in the minutest degree do they deviate from the instructions given by God.
At every moment, there are innumerable happenings in the universe. For instance, the orbiting of the stars, the shining of the sun and the moon and the rotation of the earth. Similarly, the rains, changes in the weather, diverse cosmic events, the continuous habitation of man and the animals on earth, and other such countless happenings as are constantly taking place in the world. All of these are arranged by the angels. The angels are completely loyal and obedient workers.
The angels are invisible to human beings but human beings are visible to them. They keep a watch over human beings on God’s behalf. It is these angels who have the power to take a person’s soul at the time of death, and bring that soul to God.
The angels are facilitators of this present universe as well as the organizers of heaven and hell in the Hereafter. These angels are countless in number.
The functioning of the angels may be illustrated by the example of a big factory. In a big factory, there are on the one hand large and complex machines and on the other hand is the product of the machines for which the factory has been built. But these machines do not function on their own. For them to function, human workers are required. Therefore, in every factory a number of human workers are there to make the machines work in the desired way. Similarly, in the vast factory of the universe, there has to be the instrumentality of countless angels for everything to happen as it should. The difference between the two factories is that in the earthly factories, the human workers are visible, whereas in the universal factory, the workers or the angels are not visible to the human eye.