Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [400]
To give concrete expression to this triumph, Muslims quickly built on the Temple Mount in Jersualem (691 or 692 CE), a new building called a mikdasa (a sanctuary, not a mosque), which explicitly mirrors a Hebrew designation for the Jewish Temple (Beth Hamikdas), destroying and replacing the church that the Byzantine Christians had constructed there. It is the oldest surviving Muslim building outside of Arabia. On the Dome of the Rock were placed inscriptions stating that God is single and unique, that He needs no help or partner, and that He neither begets nor is begotten: “Praise be to God, who begets no son, and has no partner;” “He is God, one, eternal;” “He does not beget, He is not begotten, and He has no peer” (Q 112).22
These brief statements certainly mean to contradict the main premise of Christianity, replacing it with a new dispensation, represented by the new, powerful, architectural statement (itself based on a Byzantine church). So Islam both inherited and emulated the importance that Jerusalem had achieved in Judaism and Christianity, which Islam acknowledges as its legitimate but incomplete predecessors.23 At the same time as it incorporates themes from its predecessors, Islam always insists that its claims take precedence over the previous revelations.
According to the later tradition of the prophet’s sayings (the Hadith), which is richly detailed, the soul, once separated from the body, goes on a journey similar to Muḥammad’s mi’raj, leaving earth from Jerusalem. Muḥammad had already ascended to the heavens from there while alive and was able to look down into the recesses of hell. In later tradition, Muḥammad’s body is specially prepared for the trip by the purification of his heart (from Q 94). The angel Gibril opens Muḥammad’s chest and washes it clean of impurities in a golden basin before restoring it to him. Thus, Muḥammad was ritually cleansed of all doubt, idolatry, paganism, and heresy so he can visit the pure Temple precincts and then join the even purer, heavenly hosts in the celestial Temple.
Later tradition tells many more stories of Muḥammad’s ascent. While in heaven, he meets all the prophets, including Moses, and the angels residing in the various heavens. He has an audience before the divine throne, during which the command for Muslims to pray fifty times a day is communicated. It is Moses who advises him to return to God’s presence, again and again, to reduce the onerous prayer requirements. Islam eventually ordained that Muslims should pray in fixed fashion, five times a day, twice more than Jews, and equal in number to Zoroastrian daily prayers. The Quran itself specifies prayer only three times a day-morning, noon, and night-but this story makes the added requirements seem light.24
Besides legitimating an increase in the number of Islamic daily prayers, the “Night Journey” story also defends against some of the objections of Muḥammad’s early Arabian detractors-namely, that Muḥammad was simply an ordinary person. Though he promulgated a revelation, he showed few of the conventional characteristics of ecstatic holy men and mantic prophets who practiced in the Arabian peninsula. The Quran preserves some of these objections: “What’s with this ‘messenger’? He eats food and walks about in the marketplace. Why hasn’t an angel been sent down to him, to be a warner with him” (Q 25:7)?25
Quran sura 25:32 makes these objections painfully clear:
We shall not believe in you until you cause a spring to burst
forth for us from the earth,
Or until you have a garden of dates and grapes and cause
rivers to burst forth abundantly in their midst,
Or until you cause the sky to fall upon us in pieces, as you
have pretended