Death and the Afterlife in Islam

Catalog description

What happens after death? If there is an Afterlife, how is it connected to earthly life? What would the Afterlife actually look like? What role does God or Satan play in the Afterlife? Since the earliest Qur'anic Revelations, Muslims have questioned, imagined and written about the Afterlife. In this course, we will read widely from across the Islamic religious and literary traditions, reading primary texts in translation. We will begin with a survey of the imagination of the Afterlife in scriptural, religious and literary texts, before examining the role and importance of the Afterlife in Islamic legal thinking and morality. Thereafter, we will focus on theological and ethical problems that arise from the imagination of the Afterlife, focusing in particular on the gendered experience of the Afterlife, as well as the question of whether the individual has free will and moral agency or whether eschatological fate is predetermined.