Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [399]
Later Views of the Afterlife
AFTER ITS INITIAL statement, Islamic traditions of the afterlife proliferate in as many ways as do Jewish and Christian ones. People all over the world want more detail about what awaits them after death. Muslims narrate that the angel of death (Izra’il) comes to remove the soul, which happens painlessly as the soul travels upward in the company of angels. Time in barzakh is usually understood as a kind of purgatory in which the body can feel the excruciatingly painful effects of decomposition. The angels Munkar and Nakir question the deceased and supervise the punishment process in the grave, depending on the good deeds (’ibada) of the deceased. The angel who blows the trumpet at the final judgment becomes Israfil, if it is not Gibril. This moment is the occasion of enormous elaboration in later Muslim tradition. People are reclothed in flesh and sit on the grave waiting for their verdict. This is followed by the great gathering (al-Ḥashr) and the standing (al-Ma’amad) when the pious and impious contemplate their lives on earth. The adumbrated story emphasizes contemplation of one’s deeds so as to spur better behavior.
We cannot trace the entire history of Muslim afterlife. A sample will have to suffice. A famous and well-known fifteenth-century author, al-Suyuti, describes the blessed and the “heretical” or condemned (kafirun) in their abodes after the final judgment. Al-Suyuti believes that heaven and hell are part of the present cosmos, not created at the judgment; therefore, the faithful dead can travel about, even visiting the living through dreams and visions. Sometimes the faithful dead are winged creatures, like birds, visiting the various heavens. Martyrs are described as beautiful green (a lucky and prefered color) birds living in the highest heaven, enjoying its lush foliage and water features while the kafirs (heretics or nonmuslims) are condemned to be devoured by huge black birds in hell (sijjin or the Wadi Barhut).21
Islam rejects reincarnation because reincarnation encourages moral laxness: For a believer in platonic reincarnation any good deed missed or any bad deed perpetrated in this life can be fixed in the next. Reincarnation has been condemned in Judaism and Christianity as well, though the idea occurs more frequently in Jewish lore and sometimes sneaks in through the backdoor in mystical meditation or in the Church Fathers. It does the same in Islamic mysticism and various sectarian movements.
In general though, Muslim eschatology is geared towards conversion and then for enforcing correct, moral behavior: For an ordinary Muslim, there is only one chance to live morally; everything about one’s destiny depends on doing good in this life, a single chance to earn one’s immortality, making necessary continuous moral striving (literally: jihad), and making Islam hard to synthesize with Neoplatonism.
Nevertheless, it did so, quite successfully, in exactly the same way that Judaism and Christianity did-by accepting the Neoplatonic cosmology with its view of revelation of the good through successive spheres and, at the same time, denying or deemphasizing reincarnation. As in Judaism and Christianity, Neoplatonism was an important stimulus to mysticism because it validated ecstatic states in which the good and the divine could be apprehended in meditation. Islamic mystical language particularly emphasized the subsumption of the soul entirely into the being of God in “extinction” (fana’), which sometimes becomes a description of the afterlife. Neoplatonism gave Islam its notion of an immortal soul also.
Mi’raj and the Heavenly Journey of the Soul
WHILE THE Quran itself says almost nothing about Muḥammad’s “Night Journey” (the mi’raj), it becomes the subject of a later tradition in which Muḥammad leaves this earth from Jerusalem on his steed al-Boraq (from Lightning, al-barq). Although Jerusalem is not mentioned in the original quite brief report of the mi’raj in the Quran and, indeed, the Arabs did not conquer Jerusalem until after Muḥammad