Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

258 t CHAPTER TEN
Note: The Muslim notion of a grave ordeal may have had rabbinic
origins. Early on the rabbis held that the bodies of the newly dead
experienced pain, chiefly, it appears, for “purgatorial” purposes,
namely to atone for sins committed during life (BT Sanhedrin 47b).
Thereafter the “Pains of the Grave” became synonymous with the
“Judgment of the Grave.” And the judgment is a “public” one: an
angel causes the dead souls to assume bodily forms so that they may
be recognized by the other dead. The punishments are exacted by
angels, either the single Angel of Death or a group of five such, and
they exactly fit the sins being punished, whether of the lips, the eyes,
the ears, or the limbs.
At the end of the ordeal, the appropriate chastisements are
meted out to those who deserve them—a kind of purgatorial process
for those who in the end will not deserve hell—and, for the
faithful, the fitting rewards, a foretaste in the tomb itself of the
pains of Gehenna and the pleasures of Paradise. Then, according
to most accounts, a sleep comes upon the dead until the Final
Hour, the Resurrection, and the Judgment.
The Cosmology of the Other World
It was in the Valley of Jehosephat, on the eastern side of the city of
Jerusalem, that all three traditions placed the site of the Last Judgment,
one of the events that would unfold in the great eschatological
drama at the far edge of time and the near edge of eternity, and
the Kaaba would be miraculously transported to Jerusalem to witness
it. The localization of the rest of those events was somewhat
more problematic and depended on how the dramatists viewed the
world and its parts. The ancients shared two views of the universe,
what may be termed a “popular” and a “scientific” version. On a
popular level, the earth was thought of as a circular but flat surface,
surrounded at its rim by a body of water, which the Greeks
called Ocean, and was covered with a vault in which were the
planets and the stars. Mythical lands and places, like the Garden of