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By Root 2338 0

taught that only the good among the faithful could count on resurrection; the bad believers and infidels were punished by their inability to gain resurrection at the day of judgment. The development of a notion of an interim state develops in response to the perceived delay in the arrival of the “day of judgment,” just as the notions of the immortality of the soul and Original Sin develop in Christianity in response to the delay of the parousia. Later Muslim tradition adds a hell to the story, Jahannam (cognate with the Hebrew Gehinom, “Gehenna,” but also called sijjin or the Wadi Barhut), giving the imagination space to expatiate on the punishments that await sinners after the day of judgment. All of these notions have social benefits-they encourage the faithful and aid in missionary outreach to prospective converts, as they do in every religion. We have seen the phenomenon before in Christianity. Islam produces a unique but similar synthesis in which the dead retain a permanent identity in the interim period so that they can be rewarded and punished before the final consummation.

When the body, though dead, is conceived of as the residence of a sensate person in the grave until the bodily resurrection, there does not need to be much more philosophical reflection about an essence of the person’s identity, because it adheres to the corpse. The carrier of identity can remain the body when the afterlife is thought of as resurrection of the body. But Arabic contains the equivalent terms to the other Semitic tongues we have studied: nafs for “soul” and ruh for “spirit.” They appear in the Quran and early Muslim writings. Like the other Semitic tongues, Arabic imposes its own connotations on the terms. In Arabic, nafs generally means “self” in a reflexive, grammatical sense (as in “I myself”) more than “soul” and the ruh means “spirit,” which designates God’s spirit imparted to humanity.

When the day of judgment does not arrive in Christianity and Judaism, attention turns to postmortem reward and punishment. Islam also readjusts its expectations and develops an intermediate sense of self. As Muslim tradition adumbrates, the barzakh period begins to be seen more and more as a separate place, like purgatory, in which the dead become penitents to work off their sins in contrition and punishment. Then, it becomes important to be able to account for how the person can be both a corpse in the grave and also have an identity somewhere else doing penance. When this happens there is a tendency to use the two terms, nafs and rub, to carry the freight of a separate identity apart from the body. In this context, nafs and rub are often synonymous.

In Quran 39:42 we find the difficult ayya:

God takes unto Himself the souls [al-anfus, plural of nafs] at their deaths, and that which has not died [He takes] in its sleep. He keeps that for which He has ordained death and sends the other to its appointed term. In that are signs for a thoughtful [person.]

In commenting on this verse, Muslim exegetes tried to determine the difference between the departure of souls at death and during sleep and the differences between the nafs and ruḥ. The nafs al-’aql wa’l-tamyiz (“the soul” possessing the rational faculties of intelligence and discrimination) is the part of the “self” that is taken by God during sleep while sometimes the rub is viewed as another part of the “self,” nafs al-ḥayat wa’l ḥaraka (“the soul” possessing life and movement), namely that by which God gives life. Again, the notion of “self” reaches a more distinct form when a community needs to define a person as different from the body, an identity that survives death-namely, the transcendent part of the personality, and to describe how the person continues into immortality.20 In this case, however, the split is only temporary since in the final disposition persons will regain a renewed body on a reconstructed earth (or at least a new habitation in paradise). The bodily resurrection makes possible intensifications of earthly pleasures-like food and wine, shade and leisure, pleasant odors,