Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

256 t CHAPTER TEN
dead must occur, a prodigious and troubling event. It is then that
the wicked and the good, the sheep and the goats, the “companions
of the right hand and the companions of the left hand”
(Quran 56:8–9) will be solemnly summoned to God’s tribunal,
their virtues and vices spelled out—angels have been recording
these in books (82:10–12)—and judgment rendered. It is in fact
no different from what was decreed for each individual at the moment
of death; now, however, God’s justice is vindicated to all. The
judgment itself is swelled by the desire to make certain that no
heroes and particularly no enemies of God go unnoted. This is a
time for settling some very human scores since the enemies of God
often live up the street or in the house next door, as is graphically
illustrated by the Quran, where one unhappy Meccan, Abu Lahab,
is consigned by name to hell in sura 111.
Acts 1 and 2 of the eschatological drama are broad canvases for
painters and poets; Act 3, “Punishments and Rewards,” has ample
graphic space as well, but it became more precisely the scratch pad
for the theologians and jurists who there, in the midst of the cool
running waters of Paradise and raging flames of Hell, had to explain
how any of this could happen.
The Muslim Dead
The drama begins with death. The rituals surrounding death and
the dead are simple ones in Islam. The body of the deceased is
ritually washed and wrapped in a shroud, some brief funeral
prayers (janaza) are said in a mosque immediately after the canonical
salat, and the interment—cremation, which is traditionally forbidden
in Judaism and Christianity, is likewise not countenanced
in Islam—takes place as quickly as possible, sometimes on the very
day of death. The Quran says nothing of this; its attention is directed
almost exclusively to the larger stage of the yawm al-din,
the Day of Judgment, as it is called in both Arabic and Hebrew.
In the face of this quranic silence on what happens between
death and the Judgment, the events that follow an individual Muslim’s
death unfold in a somewhat confused fashion in the literature