Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 257
on the subject. It is due in part to the freedom of the popular
imagination to cast details into that silent vacuum and in part to
the difficulty of reconciling what is called in Christianity the “General”
and the “Particular” Judgment. All Muslim accounts do
agree that the hour of death, what immediately precedes and follows
an individual’s passing, is a painful and troubled time, rendered
even more difficult by the widespread belief that Satan
makes a particular effort to persuade the believer to desert the
faith just before dying.
At death, the spirit (ruh) or soul (nafs)—to the chagrin of the
philosophers, the two words are often used together or interchangeably
in these accounts—leaves the body. At once a moral
distinction is discernible. The soul of the believer slips easily from
the body and is escorted by white-clad angels through the seven
heavens, pausing, much in the manner of the Jewish “Palaces” accounts,
to deliver the appropriate password to the guardian of
each sphere, until it reaches the Throne of God, though not God’s
own presence. According to some accounts, the souls of the sinner
and the unbeliever attempt to make the same ascent but they are
turned back. But at some point, the souls of both the believer and
sinner must be returned to the cadaver in order to undergo the
ordeal called the “Punishment of the Tomb.”
There are suggestions but no clear warrant for this ordeal in the
Quran. The hadith, however, describe in graphic terms the violent
scrutiny, indeed a test of faith, given the newly dead, who are ordered
to “sit up” by two mysterious angels, Munkar and Nakir.
The “torment of the grave” is affirmed as dogma in various Muslim
creeds, chiefly because it was challenged by Islam’s early rationalists,
the Mutazilites, who choked on the notion of punishments
being visited on a dead body. The traditionalists had reluctantly to
concede, relying on a puzzling quranic remark—“Thereof We created
you and thereto We return you, and thence we bring you forth
a second time” (20:55)—that God had in fact to reunite the soul
once more with the body for the verse to make sense. Finally, the
newly deceased is confronted by two other figures, one attractive
and fragrant, the other repellent and malodorous, who represent
the good and evil done during life.