Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

260 t CHAPTER TEN
A Heavenly Journey
There was no place for such a terrestrial Eden in the scientific view
of the universe to which the monotheists were all eventually introduced.
In this model God dwelled out in the timeless space beyond
the seventh heaven, and the notion of bliss for the believers was
slowly transformed from restoration to the happiness of our pristine
state into a desire to dwell with God, and, as the mystics
thought, even to anticipate this good fortune by gazing on God in
this life. To reach God’s domicile required a perilous journey outward
and upward. Second Temple Jews began to lay out the itinerary
of the soul’s voyage through the spheres to the Throne of God,
and eventually this became a staple of meditation, and expectation,
among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics alike. The return
to God and the enjoyment of his presence was an increasingly
attractive prospect for the virtuous. It was reinforced by the notion
that the soul, the immortal spiritual soul whose existence and identity
emerged from contact with Greek philosophical theories, had
originated in the heavens and at birth had descended through the
spheres, acquiring in its descent the various astral influences. This
premise made astrology, which attempted to read those influences,
endlessly fascinating to ancient and medieval men and women of
all faiths. The dead, then, did not merely “go to heaven”; they
were returning to their original home.
Multistoried versions of heaven and hell made their formal appearance
in monotheism in the Jewish apocalypses of the post-
Exilic era, but what began there within a journey as a frame tale
more often reappeared, particularly in the rabbis’ homiletic tales,
as simple exposition. The anonymous rabbinic narrator simply described
the Garden and Gehenna, and in ever increasing detail.
Dante’s celebrated tour of heaven, hell, and purgatory represents
the continuation of the “journey” tradition in Christianity, but the
true sequel to the heavenly journeys of the postbiblical era, and
perhaps even the source, as some have suggested, from which
Dante derived both the model and many of the details of his Commedia,
is the trope of the celestial journeys that first appears in the
Quran and had a luxuriant afterlife in Islam.