Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [397]
The Grave and the Barzakh
MUSLIM BURIAL customs generally parallel Jewish ones. The dead are buried as soon as possible and doing so is a good deed, in spite of the un-cleanness associated with touching the dead. They are bathed, clothed simply, and put in a clean shroud, legendarily to allow the dead to visit each other in heaven. Coffins are unnecessary but simple ones may be used; excessive display at funerals is against the spirit of Islam, as it is in Judaism.
There are also unique aspects of the tradition: Because Muḥammad was buried at night, nighttime became opportune for a funeral but it is not a necessary aspect of the ceremony. Women are forbidden to attend funerals at all, presumably because of their unrestrained expressions of grief. In general, Muslim funeral rites attempt to correct the excesses of ancient Near Eastern mourning rituals, as do Jewish ones as well. We have seen evidence of the ancient elaborations of funerals in the myths of Babylon and Canaan. In Islam, the body’s decomposition is often viewed as a sentient experience for the corpse, with the pain serving as penance for the sins of life.
At first, there is very little, either in the Quran or classical canonical Muslim texts, to explain what happens to the individual “in the grave” before the day of judgment. The seeds of the later teaching can be found in Q 23:100ff., a passage that discusses a barzakh, a barrier, separating the departed from this life. The Arabic term is a Persian loan word, farsakh, meaning “a physical barrier” or “hindrance” or “separation.” It was used in Old Persian to designate a unit of measurement, which was also borrowed into Greek as the word parasang.19 The original Quranic passage is, granted, somewhat ambiguous but the term barzakh eventually comes to extend to both the time every individual waits for the day of judgment (in the grave) and the habitation of the dead who are awaiting judgment.
The original Quranic idiom is used to express that those on earth have only one life to prove their worth, that the dead have no second chance. This is an important incentive to repentance and conversion, as well as a call to charitable works:
When death comes to a wrongdoer, he will say: “Lord, let me go back, that I may do good works in the world I have left behind.”
Never! These are the very words which he will speak. Behind them there shall stand the barrier (al-barzakh) ‘til the Day of Resurrection. And when the trumpet is sounded, on that day, their ties of kindred shall be broken, nor shall they ask help of one another. (Q 23:100-102)
The term appears in a sermon meant to convince the hearer of the necessity of submission to Islam by explaining that repentance and belated promises to do good will be of no avail after death. There is a barrier separating the dead from the living.
Although the exhortation to a moral life is conspicuous, the meaning of the term barzakh is not entirely clear to later tradition. Other occurrences of the term in Suras 25:55 and 55:60 do not mention the dead, rather talk about the insurmountable barrier that God has placed between the oceans. This may suggest that the original meaning had as much to do with the lack of communication between the living and the dead, a theme sounded at the end of the ayya. The dead are not able to contact the living hence no one is to be consulted in the grave because the dead cannot hear the living (Sura 35:19-22; 27:80). This is meant to arrest universally popular spiritualism. On the other hand, the living can visit the afterlife, both in dreams and visions, because that warns humans about what awaits believers and nonbelievers after death.
Earliest Islam essentially