Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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women by Fatima, and passing on their way the various pieces of
cosmic furniture that the tradition had located there, the heavenly
Kaaba (52:4), for example, and the “Guarded Tablet” (85:22), the
prototype of the Quran. Finally, “the veil is lifted” and God appears
to the faithful, shining “like the full moon.”
The blatant anthropomorphism of these scenes caused uneasiness
in some quarters, as might be imagined. The Mutazilites, Islam’s
early rationalists, simply read the “looking toward their
Lord” verse in another way to eliminate the spatial implications of
“turning” and the physical one of “seeing.” There was further relief
to those anxieties in a hadith where Muhammad reports God
as saying, “I have prepared for My servants what no eye has ever
seen nor ear heard nor human heart ever felt.” This provided
a welcome rejection of all similitude and enabled the majority
of Muslims to embrace the reward of a “vision of God,” even
though, like many Christian theologians, they could not quite explain
it. It was in this form that the Beatific Vision took its place in
various Muslim creeds: “The faithful will see Him in Paradise,
with their bodily eyes, but without making comparisons (between
Him and us) and without ‘howness’ (kayfiyya),” that is, the need
to explain.
Are the Martyrs in Paradise?
Islam no less than Christianity has a martyr tradition, and for
much the same reason. Both communities were early on faced with
a sometimes violent hostility, the Christians from the Roman Empire,
the Muslims from the hostile Quraysh of Mecca. For a long
time the Christians put up no resistance to their Roman persecutors
and so became “witnesses” (martyres) to their faith by their
willingness to suffer and die rather than deny it. Those witnesses
almost immediately became the objects of veneration both by liturgical
cult—rites were celebrated at their tombs—and by reason of
the special intercessory powers they were believed to have with
God. These are the hallmarks of the Christian saint, a person