Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 261
A heavenly journey stands at the very heart of Muslim spirituality.
The prototype is Muhammad’s own Ascension (miraj) into
heaven in the course of the famous Night Journey that carried him
from Mecca to Jerusalem, thence to the highest heaven and back to
his native city, all in the course of a single night. The Quran does
no more than allude to it, but the journey, and particularly the
Prophet’s transit through the heavens, quickly became the stuff of
Muslim legend. It soon showed up in enlarged form in the biographies
of the Prophet. Eventually there were freestanding treatises
devoted entirely to the Ascension of the Prophet—it would have
been the translation of one such into Italian that possibly fell into
the hands of Dante—and Muslim artists, despite the prohibition
against images, found the Ascension a rich ground for illustration.
In its original quranic setting, the story of the Night Journey and
the Ascension was perhaps intended to explain the divine origins
of Muhammad’s revelations, and so it continued to do. But as the
story became enlarged, it also included a glimpse into hell and its
inhabitants, either on the Prophet’s way to Jerusalem or from the
vantage point of the third heaven. In its later versions, the seven
heavens of the standard cosmology no longer house Muhammad’s
prophetic predecessors as they had in the earliest accounts but
were now populated by a great variety of angelic spirits. The Muslim
exploration of heaven had begun.
The Quranic Eschaton
The Quran preaches the Final Judgment in as vivid terms as the
New Testament and the Jewish Apocrypha, though there is no
clear evidence that it was believed to be imminent, or that Muhammad
was in any sense its herald, as Jesus was thought to be. Like
its Christian and Jewish counterparts, the Muslim eschaton unfolded
in a series of acts, connected at the near end to each individual’s
death and judgment and at the far end to a universal Day
of Judgment (yawm al-din) or Day of Resurrection (yawm alqiyama).
At “the hour,” a trumpet will sound and the world will
be rolled up like a scroll. At the second call of the trumpet, the