The AMI Podcast

Science & British Muslim Religious Leadership Overview by Dr Stephen Jones, Dr Saleema Burney and Dr Riyaz Timol

Religion is often used as a reason for opposing the principle of an assisted death. In fact, the principle is supported by people who belong to the Church of England, Church of Scotland, Church of Wales, Catholicism, Baptist Church, Methodist Church, URC and, more widely, Quakerism, Liberal and Reform Judaism, and Sunni Islam. For myself, Jesus embodies love, compassion, tenderness, forgiveness, dignity, respect, humanity, and humaneness. These traits are to the fore in the practice of Christian faith, and because of that, I am drawn to supporting assisted dying legislation, at least in some form: for those terminally ill who are mentally sound. Assisted dying legislation is centred on personal choice, the relief of suffering, the avoidance of indignity, and the honouring of humanity. Our understanding of what it is to be a human being underpins the possibility of choice; in part, our understanding is culturally determined. I argue that there is nothing in the Bible which explicitly excludes the principle of assisted dying. The ethical issue of a physician-assisted death on a patient who is mentally competent and terminally ill is not in the Scriptures, either the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or New Testament. Biblical texts may be stretched one way or another but assisted dying, as we understand it, was not an issue of the ancient world. From first-hand experience at his brother’s bedside, the late Hans Küng, witnessed intolerable suffering and asked, ‘Is this the sort of death God wants?’ As a society, we must face the legal and moral ambiguity that people in the UK travel abroad for an assisted death. People of faith, individuals within faith communities, have travelled abroad for an assisted death. Clergy have supported people who have chosen an assisted death. We also need to be honest about the medical practice of ‘double effect’. Excellent palliative care ought not to be under threat by the introduction of assisted dying legislation. Moreover, in all areas of medical practice, medical practitioners need to be aware of their own value systems so as not to impose, consciously or unconsciously, their value system onto patients. It is also true that that things may go wrong in the procedures of an assisted death, but mistakes and unforeseen consequences happen in most medical procedures: risk is unavoidable. Made in the image of God, we are moral decision-makers and this includes in matters of life and death.

This paper looks closely at the process of Tahara (ritual washing of the dead before burial) practiced in the Jewish religion. It will also explore similarities and differences with ritual washing of other traditions, including the Islamic custom of Ghusl. And it will include a short section on the practicalities of performing the ritual during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Among the core tenets of Jewish belief is that all human beings are holy and were created in the ‘Image of God’. Therefore, in life as in death, we are obliged to treat people with the utmost dignity and respect. The question of what happens to a person after death has been of great interest to all religions. In Judaism, when a person dies, their body which housed their Neshamah (soul), must be treated with the same respect as it was during their life. Jewish medical ethics, for the most part, prevents hastening death. Just as a new-born child is swaddled after birth, the Met (deceased) is washed and dressed as they are prepared for burial. The ritual process is called Tahara (purification).

Rooting itself in in faith and reason, which Pope John Paul II described as two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of Truth, traditional Catholic teaching gives articulation to both natural and supernatural Revelation, by teaching us that human beings are composite creatures, composed of body and soul; the soul being the nobler component element, although without this every being permitted to reduce the value of the body; and that we are made in imago Dei, to the likeness and image of God, giving foundation to much of Christian ethics and to its teaching about the meaning and nature of death. A living human body is patently not the same thing as a corpse. The soul is the fundamental difference between corpse and living being. A corpse cannot move, eat, think, self-express, or take joy in something or feel sadness. It can only disintegrate and return to dust. Something must stop our bodies from doing that in the present moment, and that is the soul. As surely as every activity must have a principle of operation behind it, the principle by which a person loves, makes rational choices, experiences happiness or grief, is a real thing. It is not nothing, less than the very body it animates. Nor is it a chemical. No forensic scientist, examining a corpse, can tell you what chemical is missing leading to its death, as if there were nothing else save chemical substances. Human life cannot be generated by a gathering of chemical substances, for it is quite patently animated by the soul or spirit. It is this soul that survives the physical death of the body; although it may be a popular opinion in the received wisdom of our age that there is no continuance after death, a reflection upon the simple structure of the soul, upon the future administration of the sanctions attached to the moral law, upon the rectification of worldwide inequalities, and upon the teleological inclinations to a lasting and perfect good, makes it a violation of reason to deny the soul’s survival. This, in and of itself, changes the whole aspect of the nature and finality of death, making the process worth re-examining.

The nature of the soul in life and in death, as well as its moral, ontological, and eschatological transformation is a problem that has exercised Muslim thinkers and generated a range of theological, philosophical, and mystical speculation. Ideas about the malleability and ambiguity of the soul may be said to derive from the Qur’anic references to the nafs, but the issue of the nature and existence of the soul in death (and prior to the Day of Resurrection) is not clearly elaborated in scripture. The influence of Greek thought on Muslim theology and philosophy further complicated Muslim debates about the soul. Neither Plato’s idea of the separability of the soul from matter, nor Aristotle’s view that the soul—which he conceived of as inextricably connected to the material body (unlike intellect)—did not continue to exist after death was consistent with the many Qur’anic references to the existence of souls with their bodies in the hereafter. For many Muslim thinkers, questions about the nature of the soul’s transition to and in death could only be answered with reference to an understanding of the ontological nature of the soul itself. Like Aristotle, many leading Muslim theologians and philosophers understood the soul as a “substance,” and they endeavored to theorize the nature of its “substance” in a way that would be logically consistent with Qur’anic and Islamic ideas of the soul’s transitions in both life and death. In this paper, I compare the thought of two major Muslim thinkers on the problem of the soul, its nature, and its transitions: Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) and Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1636). Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī was an Andalusian Muslim mystic and metaphysician, who thought about the soul neither as material, nor as purely spiritual, but as a meeting (or barzakh) between the two, with its changeability related to its intermediate state. For Mullā Ṣadrā, a Shiʿi theosopher who creatively synthesized the thought of many earlier Muslim thinkers, including Ibn ʿArabi, the soul is the site of the transformation between the material and spiritual realities of the human being. The soul, he argued, undergoes a continuous process of both epistemological and ontological transformation, which he referred to as “trans-substantial motion” (al-ḥaraka al-jawhariyya), and which allowed him to posit the soul’s transformations both in life and in death as part of a seamless process of human becoming.

This paper aims to articulate and compare three conceptions of the relationship between the “life before death” and the “life after death”, that can be found in the Qurʾān. These three conceptions can be called “Legal conception”, “Philosophical conception”, and “Mystical conception” respectively. The first conception portrays God as a lawgiver and humans as His subjects. Like other legal systems, divine law (Sharīʿa) comprises of some rewards and punishments for those who abide by it and those who transgress it. But unlike secular legal systems, the main rewards and punishments are postponed until the next world. Therefore, since the relationship between positive laws and their sanction is conventional as opposed to real/natural, the relationship between what we do in this world and what we receive in the next is also conventional. The second conception posits that the relationship between what we do in this world and the reward and punishment that are waiting for us in the next world is causal, meaning that what we do in our life on Earth produces good or bad consequences in the hereafter. Like other causal relationships between causes and their effects, this relationship is real not conventional. According to the third conception, the relationship between our actions in this world and what we would experience in the next world is neither conventional nor causal. It is deeper than that. That is, whatever we do has two simultaneous and inseparable aspects: apparent and hidden. However, while the apparent aspect is observable in this world, the hidden aspect only becomes apparent once we die. I explore and substantiate these three conceptions using some of the relevant verses of the Qurʾān and then argue that the last conception is the correct one, but since it is beyond the imagination and understanding of most people, the Qurʾān has had to utilise the two former conceptions to simplify the matter, so that ordinary people can have at least a vague understanding of this central and abstract religious concept.

This paper surveys Jewish concepts of the human soul from Biblical to modern times, showing the changing ideas of the psyche over the centuries. It commences with an examination of the vocabulary of the human spirit in Hebrew Scriptures, involving terms like nefeš (life, breath, self, life-force), ruaḥ (wind or spirit) and nᵊšāmāh (breath, breathing thing). Early Biblical writings show little sign of body/soul dualism, but by the later stages, passages in the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, for example, raise questions about the possibility of spiritual survival after death. Intertestamental writings, and the New Testament, show that such dualism had developed, probably under Hellenistic influence, and became a topic of interest in Rabbinic discourse, where ideas about post-mortem spiritual survival coexist in a complex and unresolved way with the belief in bodily resurrection at the end of days. In contrast to Christian orthodoxy, which insisted on the creation of the soul simultaneously with the body at conception, a Rabbinic consensus developed that all souls were created at the beginning of time and exist in inchoate form with God until their time comes to be incarnated. In the influential synthesis of Rabbinic Judaism and Islamic Aristotelianism created by Moses Maimonides (12th century), the focus of belief in immortality shifts from the soul to the mind. The soul, as the form of the body, perishes with its material counterpart, and only the “acquired intellect” survives. The impersonal and elitist implications of this concept proved unacceptable to most contemporary and subsequent Jewish thinkers. Under Neoplatonic influence, Jewish mystics drew upon the variety of Biblical terminology to create a complex, multi-layered theory of the soul. This evolved from an earlier three-tiered model (nefeš–ruaḥ–nᵊšāmāh: active–emotional–intellectual) to a more complex one, in which only the lower levels were “contained” in the body, while the higher ones exist constantly in a heavenly sphere. To this was added the idea of the universal soul, like that of Adam. Stemming from the Shi’i-influenced teaching of Judah Halevi, that Jews inherit an ʾamr ʾilāhī as their unique connection with God, later Kabbalah and Ḥasidism came to teach that Jews alone possess a divine soul that is “an actual portion of God from above.” The paper explores the particularistic implications of this doctrine. Finally, the paper considers developments from Bruno Bettelheim’s interpretation of Freud’s concept of the psyche to the prevalent agnosticism among many Jews today, about the existence of an immortal soul – perhaps a return full-circle to the non-dualist Biblical conception of the human being.

Questions pertaining to the nature of the human soul and its purpose through bodily existence have perplexed the minds of humanity from time immemorial. The issue is further compounded, for the Abrahamic faiths, due to their presumption of a Merciful God who initiates the existence of the soul and places it in the domain of strife and suffering as a part of God’s bestowal. The reconciliation between the notions of a benevolent God who initiates the human soul and the prospect of the soul’s eternal damnation, without allowing for a pre-worldly existence for the soul with the ability of discretion and choice to come into this world, becomes extremely difficult. Through reference to the Qur’ānic verses and its accompanying exegesis, together with the deliberations of Muslim philosophers and mystics, this paper explores the idea of a pre-worldly existence of individual souls who choose to enter a worldly existence. The human souls both pre-exist their embodied states and are eternal posterior to death. This is because death and life are states of the body and not the point for the origination of the soul; the soul is merely initiated in the worldly domain through a bodily medium, and allowed agency through the body during bodily life and denied such agency at the point of bodily death. The life of this world, or the lowly life (hayat al-dunya), is an unreal and illusionary life through which human souls find an opportunity to come to the fullest of their potential. The paper will allude to how this line of reasoning can allow for the formulation of a theodicy in which human beings bear the onus of coming to a world of strife with a prospect of possible damnation. Similarly, through the aid of verses, and the thoughts of the likes of Ibn Arabi, it is postulated that the fate of individual souls at the level worldly existence is left unknown as opposed to the idea of a God Who had foreknowledge of the destinies of the souls. Finally, it will be argued that both paradise and hell cannot be eternal abodes.

In India, the law of ṭalāq as a means of dissolving a marriage is one of the most significant aspects of Muslim personal law. The Supreme Court of India declared triple ṭalāq unlawful in 2017. Subsequently, the Indian Parliament passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act 2019, declaring ṭalāq al-bidda or any other type of ṭalāq with the impact of an immediate and irrevocable divorce to be null and void, as well as a penal offense. Some regard this legislation as a landmark for gender equality for Muslim women, while others decry its repercussions. The presentation traces the legal history of ṭalāq from pre-Islamic Arabian customs through the formative years of Islam. It also provides a glimpse of the colonial administration of personal laws. It focuses specifically on the most recent development of the law of ṭalāq in India and its complications.

Stories about gendered social relations permeate the Qur'an, and nearly three hundred verses involve specific women or girls. The Qur'an features these figures in accounts of human origins, in stories of the founding and destruction of nations, in narratives of conquest, in episodes of romantic attraction, and in incidents of family devotion and strife. Overall, stories involving women and girls weave together theology and ethics to reinforce central Qur'anic ideas regarding submission to God and moral accountability. Celene Ibrahim explores the complex cast of female figures in the Qur'an, probing themes related to biological sex, female sexuality, female speech, and women in sacred history. Ibrahim considers major and minor figures referenced in the Qur'an, including those who appear in narratives of sacred history, in parables, in descriptions of the eternal abode, and in verses that allude to events contemporaneous with the advent of the Qur'an in Arabia. Ibrahim finds that the Qur'an regularly celebrates the aptitudes of women in the realms of spirituality and piety, in political maneuvering, and in safeguarding their own wellbeing; yet, women figures also occasionally falter and use their agency toward nefarious ends. Women and Gender in the Qur'an outlines how women and girls - old, young, barren, fertile, chaste, profligate, reproachable, and saintly - enter Qur'anic sacred history and advance the Qur'an's overarching didactic aims.