Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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dead sinners] have from among those they have associated with
God” (30:13). “Shall I take gods besides Him?” the pagan is made
to say. ”If the Merciful One intends some adversity, their intercession
will profit me nothing” (36:23).
Those points are made with respect to the unbelievers; it does
not mean that the faithful should lose hope. There is, as it turns
out, the strong possibility of intercession (shafaa) at the Day of
Judgment on behalf of those who have submitted but have nonetheless
sinned. The Quran repeats again and again that such intercession
occurs only when and if God allows it (20:109; 34:22). It is
not said who enjoys that privilege of intercession—the angels perhaps—but
the Muslim tradition was quick to extend it to the
greatest among them, the Prophet Muhammad, who on God’s orders
was granted special favors (17:79; 93:5), including, it was
thought, the power of intercession. The hadith fleshed out the modalities.
Muhammad is portrayed as praying for the dead, and the
custom remained normative among Muslims. Another tradition
has all the earlier prophets ceding their powers of intercession to
Muhammad, and he, in turn, exercises them on behalf of the members
of the Muslim community. What followed was simply a jurists’
debate on how far those intercessory powers extended. For
serious as well as light sins? On behalf only of those who repented
(the Christian position on intercession) or for all sinners? In the
end, the traditionalists supplied what became the normative answers:
Muhammad will intercede for all sinners and for all sins.
The Vision of God and Other Rewards of Paradise
The expectation of enjoying a “vision” of God or more simply of
“seeing” God is doubtless biblical in its origins. The intimate, even
familiar portrait of God in Genesis surely enhanced such a hope,
and even the awesome encounters of Moses with his Lord in Exodus,
while underlining the privilege, and dangers, of such occasions,
reinforced rather than ruled out the possibility. To experience
God in such a direct fashion is a theme that exalted and